148 ANALYSIS OF THE l!'OURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK Il writings ascribe to the person of Christ in relation to the human soul absolutely the same central position as the Old Testament ascribes to God. For whom were absolute confi­ dence and love reserved by Moses and the prophets ? Jesus claims them for Himself in the Synoptics, and that in the name of our eternal salvation. Would Jewish Monotheism, so strict and so jealous of God's rights, have permitted Jesus to take such a position, had He not had the distinct conscious­ ness that in the background of His human existence there was a divine personality? He cannot as a faithful Jew desire to be to us what He asks to be in the Synoptics, unless He is what He claims to be in J ohn.1 This general conclusion is reinforced by a large number of particular facts in the same writings. We have just seen how, in Luke, He who comes after the forerunner is called in the preceding words the Lord their God. In Mark, the person of the Son is placed above even the most exalted creatures: "But of that day knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son [ during the time of His humilia­ tion], but the Father" (xiii. 32). In Matthew, the Son is. placed between the Father and the Holy Spirit, the breath of God : " Baptize all nations in the name of the Father, of the· Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (xxviii. 19 ). In the parable of the husbandmen, Jesus represents Himself, in contrast to the servants sent before Him, as the son and heir of the master of the vineyard (Matt. xxi. 3 7, 3 8). It will be vain to subject. the question of Jesus in Matt. xxii. 45 : "If David, then, call Christ his Lord, how is He his son ? " to every imaginable sort of manipulation; the thought of Jesus will always come out simple and clear to the man who does not seek mid-day at dawn: If, on the one hand, Christ is David's son by His­ earthly origin, on the other, He is nevertheless his Lord in virtue of His divine personality. So Micah had already said,, v. 2. And how, if Jesus had not the consciousness of His divinity, could He speak of His angels (Matt. xiii. 41), of His. glory (xxv. 31), finally, of His name, under the invocation of

1 Schultz writes these words in his recent work on the divinity of Jesus. Christ: "The sentiment of religious dependence is not allowable except towards. the one true God ..•• We ought to bow religiously only before that which ill, really divine" (die Lelire von der Gottlieit Christi, pp. 540 and 541). ,CHAP. II.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 11:9 which the faithful are gathered together ? The Old Testament ,did not authorize any creature thus to appropriate the attri­ butes of Jehovah. Now the notion' of His pre-existence was in the mind of Jesus implicitly contained in that of His divinity. Undoubtedly we do not find in the Synoptics any declara­ tion so precise as those we have just quoted from the Johannine discourses. But do we not learn from Luke's Gospel the enormous mass of materials which would be wholly wanting if we had only those of Matthew and Mark; for example, the three parables of grace (Luke xv.: the lost sheep, the lost drachma, the prodigal son), those of the faith­ less steward, the wicked rich man (Luke xvi.), those of the unjust judge, the Pharisee and the publican (Luke xviii.), tbe narrative of Zacchreus, the incident of the converted thief, and ,so many other treasures which Luke has rescued from the -oblivion in which the other published traditions had left them, and which he alone has preserved to the church 1 How, then, could we make the omission of these few sayings in our first three Gospels an argument against their authenticity 1 If delineations so impressive and narratives so popular as those just referred to had not passed into the matter of oral evan­ gelization or into any of its written compilations, how much more easily might three or four sayings of a very elevated and profoundly mysterious character have been effaced from tradi­ tion, to reappear later as the reminiscences of a hearer who paid special attention to everything in the teaching of Jesus which concerned His person ! The dogmatic interest which those declarations have for us did not exist to the same degree then; for tbe impression of the person of Jesus, daily contem­ plated in its living fulness, filled the hearts of the believing and made up for all particular blanks. Besides, let us not forget that of those three sayings one occurred in the discourse following the multiplication of the loaves, a discourse which is wholly omitted by the Synoptics; the second, in a discoUl'se delivered at Jerusalem, and which is also omitted in them, along with the whole visit of which it forms part; the third, i.n the high-priestly prayer which they have left equally unreported. .As to John, according to his plan he must necessarily cite them if, as appears from x.r 30 and 31, he 150 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK U. wished to give account of the signs by which he had recog­ nised in Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, and which might contribute to produce in his readers the same assurance of faith. Those culminating points of the testimony of Jesus regarding His person could not be wanting in such a representation. There remains the difference in eschatological views. In the­ Synoptics, a visible return of the Lord, an external final judg­ ment, a bodily resurrection of the faithful, a reign of glory; in J uhn, no other return of Christ than His corning into the heart in the form of the Holy Spirit; no other resurrection than that of the soul by regeneration; no other judgment than the division which takes place between believers and unbelievers through the preaching of the Gospel; no other reign than the life of the believer in Christ and in God. " The whole of this Gospel is planned," says Hilgenfeld, " so as to present the historical coming of Christ as His one appearance­ on the earth." 1-But is this exclusive spiritualism which is ascribed to the fourth Gospel a reality 1 John certainly emphasizes the return of Jesus in spirit. But is it entirely to displace and deny His visible return 1 No ; according to him, the first is the preparation for the second : " I shall come again;" such is the spiritual return. Then he adds : "And I shall take you to be with me, that where I am (in the Father's house, where there are many mansions, and where Jesus Him­ self is now going) ye may be with me also" (xiv. 3); such is a consummation in some sense or other. "If I wilJ that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee 1" (xxi. 23). And in the first Epistle: "My little children, abide in Him, that when He shall appear we may have confidence" (ii. 28). "We know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him ,. (iii 2).-The spiritual judgment which John teaches is also, according to him, a preparation for the external judgment in which the dispensation of grace shall issue. "Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father ; there is one that accuseth you, even Moses in whom ye trust." " The hour is coming in which all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of man, and shall come forth ; they that have done good, to the resurrection of life ; they that have done evil, to 1 Einl. p. 728. CHAP. II.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 151 the resurrection of judgment" (v. 45 and 28, 29). Here, certainly, are an external judgment and a bodily resurrection duly proclaimed. True, Scholten thinks these verses must be an interpolation. For what reason 1 They are not want­ ing in any manuscript or version. No; but the critic has decreed a priori what the fourth Gospel must be to be the antipodes of the other three. .And as these verses form an obstacle to this supreme decision of his criticism, he takes his scissors and cuts. This is what people in our day call science . .As to the rest, there is little gained by such violent procedure. Four times successively, indeed, in eh. vi. Jesus reverts to those inconvenient facts of the last day and of the resurrection of the dead: "That of all which the Father hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day" (ver. 39); "That every one which seeth the Son and believeth on Him may have everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day" (ver. 40); "No man can come to me except the Father draw him; and I will raise him up at the last day" (ver. 44) ; "Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, . . . I will raise him up at the last day " (ver. 54). It will be confessed that it requires some hardihood to main­ tain that a book in which such a series of affirmations is found teaches neither a last judgment nor a resurrection of the body. But a public is reckoned on, and unfortunately with good right, which raises no challenge. The truth is, that agreeably to his custom the author of the fourth Gospel speaks less of external results than of spiritual preparations, because popular evangelization, and consequently the Synoptics, did exactly the opposite. Without omitting the coming of the Holy Spirit and His working in the heart (Luke xxiv. 48, 49; Matt. xxviii. 19; Luke xii. 11, 12, etc.), the first Gospels had transmitted to the church in all its details the teaching of Jesus regarding the destruction of Jerusalem, and His visible return at the end of the ages (Matt. xxiv.; Mark xiii.; Luke xxi. and xvii.). John had nothing to add on these different points. .As for us, on read­ ing the consequences which our critics draw from his silence, we cannot dissemble our astonishment: liere are men who allege that the great discourse of Jesus regarding the end of the ages, contained in the Synoptics, was never uttered by 152 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK II,

Hirn ; that it is nothing but a corn position of some Jewish or Judeo-Christian author of the year 67 or 68; and the same men dare to adduce the absence of this unauthentic discourse from John as a reason against the trustworthiness of this Gospel ! Is criticism to become a scheme of jugglery ? It is impossible, therefore, to detect an essential difference, that is to say, one bearing on the matter of doctrine, between the Synoptics and the fourth Gospel But what are we to think of the entirely different fonn in which Jesus expresses Himself in the J ohannine discourses and the Synoptic teachings ? Here, brief moral maxims of a strongly marked stamp, popular, easy to retain; there, dis­ courses of elevated scope and of a theological kind. Here, as Keim says, "the germ of the parable;" there, not a single picture of this kind. In a word, there, a simple practical spirit ; here, a mystical, lofty, dreamy cast. As to the parable, it is wanting undoubtedly in John, at least in the form in which we find it in the first Gospels ; but it must be remembered that nothing was better fitted than this kind of discourse to be the vehicle of popular evangelization in the first times of the Church. All that could be recalled of such teachings was therefore put successively in circulation in tradition, and passed thence into the first evangelic writings. What could have been the object of the author of the fourth Gospel in suppressing those teachings which he must have known, and which would have given credit to his book, sup­ posing that his narrative was a fiction? But if he simply related history, what good would it serve to repeat what every one could read in writings which were already within his reach ? He could only have been led to do otherwise if the parables had been a necessary waymark in the history of apostolical faith, which he was minded to describe; but evidently this was not the case. Besides, if we do not find the parable in the fourth Gospel in the form of complete narrative, we find it there in a very closely related form, that of allegory. This is the analogue of what in the Synoptics is called the parables of the leaven or of the grain of mustard seed ; witness the descriptions of the Shepherd, of the Door, and of the Good Shepherd (eh. x.); or that of the woman who passes suddenly from excess of grief to excess of joy (xvi. 21) ; -CHAP. II.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 153

-0r, again, that of the vine and the branches (xv. 1 ff.). It is ever the figurative and picturesque language of Him who in ,the first Gospels spoke to the people in terms like these : " What went ye out into the wilderness to see 1 A reed shaken with the wind 1" ... (Matt. xi. '7). This question very nearly recalls the saying of Jesus in our Gospel (v. 35): " John was a burning and shining light ; and ye were willing for a season to rejoice in his light." Compare also the follow­ ing figures: The Spirit is like the wind, which bloweth where it listeth, and the presence of which is not known except by the sound heard (iii. 8). The unbeliever is like the evil-doer, who seeks the night to accomplish his evil deeds (vv. 19 and 20). Spiritual emancipation is the formula of manumission which the son of the house pronounces over slaves (viii. 3 6, -etc.). Each of these figures is a parable in germ, which the .author could have developed as such if he had wished it ever .so little. As to the lofty mystical character of the discourses of Jesus, the language contrasts, it is true, with the simple, lively, piquant style of the synoptical discourses. But let us remark, i.n the first place, that this contrast has been singularly -exaggerated. Sabatier himself acknowledges this : " A -comparison of these discourses with those of the Synoptics proves that at bottom the divergence is not so great as it appears at first sight." How can we fail to recognise the voice which strikes us so forcibly in the Synoptics in those brief and powerful sayings of the J ohannine Christ, which seemed to spring from the depths of another world ? " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." "Destroy this temple, ~nd in three days I will raise it up." "Without me ye can ,do nothing." "Except the seed fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone ; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." « He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." " The prince -of this world cometh, but he hath nothing in me." There is .an indisputable fact: we find at least twenty-seven sayings of Jesus occurring in John which appear almost identically the .same in the Synoptics (see the list in the note).1 Now then!

1 JOHN. 8YNO:PTICS. ii. 19 : " Destroy this temple, and Matt. xxvi. 61 {xxvii. 40} : "This

JOHN. SYNOPTICS. temple of God, and to build it in three· days" (Mark xiv. 58 and xv. 29). iii. 18 : "He that believeth on Him Mark xvi. 16 : "He that believeth, is not condemned: but he that be­ and is baptized, shall be saved ; but he lieveth not is condemned already." that believeth not shall be condemned." iv. 44: "For Jesus Himself testified, Matt. xiii. 57 : "Jesus said unto that a prophet hath no honour in his them, A prophet is not without honour, own country." save in his own country, and in his• own house" (Mark vi 4 and Luke iv. 24). v. 8 : "Jesus saith unto Him, Rise, Matt. ix. 6 : "Arise, take up thy take up thy bed and walk." bed, and go into thine house " (Mark. ii. 9 ; Luke v. 24). vi. 20 : "It is I ; be not afraid." Matt. xiv. 27 : " It is I ; be no~. afraid'' (Mark vi. 50). vi. 35 : "He that cometh to me Matt. v. 6, Luke vi. 21 : "Blessed shall never hunger ; and he that be­ are they which do hunger and thirst· lieveth on me shall never thirst." for they shall be filled. " vi. 37 : "AU that the Father giveth Matt. :xi. 28, 29 : " Come unto me, me shall come to me ; and him that all ye that labour and are heavy laden cometh to me I will in no wise cast . • . and ye shall find rest unto your out." souls." vi. 46 : "Not that any man hath Matt. xi. 27: "No man knowetlL seen the Father, save He which is of the Son, but the Father; neither God, He hath seen the Father." Com­ knoweth any man the Father, sa,·e pare i. 18: "No man hath seen God the Son, and he to whomsoever ~he ,it any time ; the only-begotten Son, Son will reveal him" (Luke x. 22), which is in th~ bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him." xii. 8 : "For the J)OOr always ye Matt. xxvi. 11 : "For ye have the have with you; but me ye have not poor always with you; but me ye have· always." not always" (Mark xiv. 7). xii. 25 : "He that loveth his life Matt. x. 39 : "He that findeth his shall lose it ; and he that hateth his life shall lose it ; and he that loseth life in this world shall keep it unto his life for my sake shall find it" life eternal." (:xvi. 25 ; Mark viii. 35 ; Luke ix. 24, xvii. 33). xii. 27: "Now is my soul troubled; Matt. xxvi. 38: "Then saith He· ,md. what shall I say? Father, save unto them, My soul is exceeding me from this hour ; but for this cause sorrowful, even unto death" (Mark eame I unto this hour." xiv. 34 and following). xiii. 3 : "Jesus knowing that the Matt. xi. 27 : "All things are de­ Father had given all things into His livered unto me of my Father." hands." xiii 16: "Verily, verily, I say unto Matt. x. 24 : "The disciple is no~ CHAP. II.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 155 ings so original in style as those of Jesus can simultaneously and without startling in the least occupy a place in the

JOHN, SYNOPTICS, you, The servant is not greater than a hove his master, nor the servant above his lord; neither he that is sent greater his lord." than he that sent him." xiii. 20: "He thatreceiveth whom­ Matt. x. 40: "He that receiveth soever I send, receiveth me ; and he you, receiveth me ; and he that re­ that receiveth me, receiveth Him that ceiveth me, 1·eceiveth Him that sent sent me." me" (Luke x. 16). xiii. 21 : "Verily, verily, I say unto Matt. xxvi. 21 : "Verily I say unto you, That one of you shall betray me." you, That one of you shall betray me " (Mark xiv. 18). xiii. 38 : "Verily, verily, I say unto Matt. xxvi. 34: "Verily I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou thee, That this night, before the cock hast denied me thrice." crow, thou shalt deny me thrice• (Mark xiv. 30 ; Luke xxii. 34). xiv. 18 : " I will not leave you Matt. xxviii. 20 : "I am with yo1> comfortless ; I will come to you ; " and alway, even unto the end of the world." 23: "We will make our abode with him." xiv. 28 : "My Father is greater Mark xiii. 32 : "That day knoweth than I." no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." xiv. 31 : "Arise, let us go hence." Matt. xxvi. 46 : "Rise, let us be going." xv. 20: "If they have persecuted Matt. x. 25 : "If they have called me, they will also persecute you.'' the Master of the house Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of His household." xv. 21 : "But all these things will Matt. x. 22 : "Ye shall be hated of they do unto you for my name's sake." all men for my name's sake." xvi. 32 : " Behold, the hour cometh, Matt. xxvi. 31 : "For it is written, yea, is now come, that ye shall be I will smite the shepherd and the scattered, every one to his own, and sheep of the flock shall be scattered shall leave me alone." abroad." xvii. 2 : '' As Thou hast given Him Matt. xxviii. 18 : "All power is power over all flesh." given unto me in heaven and in earth." xviii. 11 : "Put up thy sword into Matt. xxvi. 62 : "Put up thy sword the sheath." again into his place." xviii. 20 : "I ever taught in the Matt. xxvi. 55 : "I sat daily with synagogue, and in the temple." you teaching in the temple." xviii. 37 : "Pilate therefore said Matt. xxvii. 11 : "And the gover­ unto Him : Art thou a king then ! nor asked Him, saying, Art thou the Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am king of the Jews! And Jesus said a king. To this end was I born." unto him, Thou sayest." xx. 23 : " Whose soever sins ye Matt. xviii. 18 (xvi. 19): ''What­ remit, tkey are remitted, , ., " etc. soever ye shall bind on earth shall b6 bound. in heaven .••• " ete. !56 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK H. two sorts of documents, it proves that these are radically homogeneous. There are especially alleged several expressions peculiar to John's style, and which are foreign to the Synoptics, for example the terms light and darkness, or expressions in use among these and which are wanting in him, such as the terms kingdom of heaven (or of GorI), for which John substitutes the less Jewish and more mystical term eternal life. But the contrast Hght and darkness occurs also in the Synoptics, witness Luke xi. 34-36 and Matt. vi. 22, 23. Is it not already very common in the Old Testament ? And as to the J ohannine expression eternal life, it is found used in the Synoptics as equivalent to kingdom of God, absolutely as in John. We take to witness the examples quoted in a note, which Beyschlag has very happily provided.1 John, besides, uses twice in the conversation with Nicodemus (iii. 3, 5), the term kingdom of God (or of heaven in the Sinaiticus). After all this, what is there remaining which could establish in the matter of form an insoluble contrast between the sayings of Jesus in John and His language in the Synoptics ? A certain difference remains, I do not deny. It consists of that altogether peculiar tone of holy solemnity, and, if I may so speak, of heavenly suavity, which distinguishes not only our Gospel, but also the First Epistle of John, from all other pro­ ductions of human thought, and which makes these writings a literature by itself; with this difference, however, already remarked, that while the course of thought is firm, and possessed of a rigorous logical tenor in the Gospel, the subjects are treated in the Epistle in a manner more soft, hesitating, and diffuse.-To explain the real contrast between the fourth Gospel and the preceding ones, we must above all take account

1 The two verses put as parallels are taken in each case from the same Gospel and the same narrative. Matt. xviii. 3 : " Ye shall not enter Ibid. ver. 8 : " It is better for thee into the kingdom of heaven." to enter into life." Matt. xix. 17 : "If thou wilt enter Ibid. ver. 23: "A rich man shall into life." hardlyenteriutothekingdomoj lieaven." Matt. xxv. 34 : "Inherit the king­ Ibid. ver. 46 : "But the righteous dom prepared for you." into life eternal." Mark ix. 45 : "It is better for thee Ibid. ver. 47: "It is better for thee to enter into life." to enter into the kingdom of God.." CHAP. II.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 157 of the influence exercised on the form of the discourses by the style peculiar to the translator, and by the work of condensa­ tion, which was the condition of reproduction. But that done, there is still a certain apparently irreducible remnant which demands separate study. It has been said that unwplained remains are in science the cause of great discoveries. We are not ambitious of making a great discovery, but we would like, nevertheless, to succeed in accounting, somewhat more cleaTly than has yet been done, for the difference before us. The question is, whether that particular tone, which might be called the Johannine timbre, was foreign to Jesus, so that our evangelist was its real creator, and put it in the mouth of the Saviour; or if it belonged to the language of Jesus Him­ self, at least at certain particular times of His life. This we have seen : the scenes related in our Gospel represent only a score of days, or even of points of time, distributed over an activity of two years and a half. A.nd it is consequently allowable to ask whether the scenes, evidently chosen with a purpose, had not an exceptional character which marked them out for the author's choice. He made a selection of the deeds, that is certain, and he says so himself (xx. 30, 31). Why should be not also have done the same with hi':l discourses? The choice in this case must have been in relation to the object of his writing, which was to show that " Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God." I£ it is so, he must naturally have chosen, from among the many discourses of Jesus, the few sayings of particular elevation which had above all contributed in his own experience to make him understand the sublime riches of the Being whom he had the blessedness to see and hear. We have a phrase which the author puts into the mouth of Jesus, according to which the latter himself distinguished between two kinds of discourses embraced by His teaching. He says to Nicodemus (iii. 12): '' If I have told you earthly things ("Ta €'1T{,yeia) and ye believed not, bow will ye believe if I tell you of hew11enly things (-ra €'1TOUpavLa) 1" In expressing Him­ self thus, Jesus reminded Nicodemus of the teachings He had given since His arrival at Jerusalem. What proved that His auditors had not been taken hold of by them (had not believed), is the fact that Nicodemus himself could advance in proof of the divine SUlleriority of the Lord's teaching, only His miracles 158 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK lL

(v. 2). What were those teachings of Jesus in which He spoke of earthly things 1 His discourses in Galilee, as we find them in the Synoptics, may give us an idea. It was the earth, that is to say, human life, with all its different obliga­ tions and relations, considered from the viewpoint of heaven. It was, for example, that sublime morality which we find developed in the Sermon on the Mount: human life in its relation to God. But from this elementary moral teaching, Jesus expressly distinguishes what He calls the teaching of heavenly things. The object of the latter is no longer the earth estimated from the heavenly viewpoint; it is heaven itself with its infinite riches. In this heaven Jesus lived incessantly while acting on the earth. He says so Himself in the following verse: "No man bath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, the Son of man which is in heaven" (ver. 13). In the intimate and uninterrupted relation which He maintained with His Father, He had access from this world below to the divine thoughts, the eternal purposes, the plan of salvation, and He could at certain times, as He does in the course of this nocturnal conversation with the pious senator, unveil to those about Him, whether friends or adversaries, facts belonging to this higher domain of heavenly things. He would not have accomplished His mission fully if He had absolutely concealed from the world what He Himself was to the heart of His Father, and what His Father was to Him. How could men have understood the infinite love of which they were the objects on the part of heaven, if Jesus had not explained to them the infinite value of the gift which God gave them in His person 1 Is not love measured by the price of its gift, the greatness of its sacrifice ? On the other hand, this revelation of heavenly things could not be the habitual object of the Lord's teachings. There were hardly one or two disciples who would have followed Him if He had kept on those celestial heights ; the yet gross-minded multitude, who asked only for a Messiah after their carnal heart, a king capable of giving them bread daily, in the literal sense of the word (vi. 15, 34), would have remained strangers to His influence, and soon left Him alone with His two or three initiated. It is doubtless for the same reason that those teachings -OHAP. II.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 15 9

regarding heavenly things remained in general outside of the first apostolic preachings and of oral evangelization. And yet, even if things happened as we have said, it is improbable that every trace of this mode of teaching, more -elevated in matter and tone, should have completely disappeared from the synoptic record. And, indeed, two of our evangelists, those who, along with John, have endeavoured most to trans­ mit the teachings of Jesus, Matthew and Luke, have preserved to us the account of a time of extraordinary emotion in our Lord's life, which furnishes us with the example we naturally expect. It is in Luke especially that we have to seek its faithful delineation (eh. x.). Jesus sent into the country­ parts and villages of Galilee seventy of His disciples, weak spiritual children, to whom He confided the task of rousing the population to understand the importance of the work which was then going forward, and the nearness of the kingdom. They return to Him overwhelmed with joy, and communicate to Him the full success of their mission. In that hour, the evangelist tells us, "Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said : 'I thank Thee, 0 Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast bid these things from the wise and prudeut, and hast revealed them unto babes ; even so, Father; for so it seemed good in Thy sight. All things are delivered to me -of my Father; and no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal Him.' " In reading these words, we ask ourselves if it is really from St. Luke or St. Matthew we are reading, and not from St John. What does the fact prove 1 That, according to the Synoptics themselves, at certain excep­ tional moments of elevation, the language of Jesus really took that gentle tone, that mystical-would it not be truer to say heavenly 1-style of which we find in them only one example, and the stamp of which is borne more or less distinctly by six or seven discourses in John. This passage, found in Luke .and Matthew, has been called an erratic block of J ohannine rock, which has strayed into the synoptic region. The figure is correct enough; what does it prove ? The least fragment of granite. -deposited on the limestone slopes of the Jura, is an undeniable proof to the geologist that somewhere in the lofty Alpine heights the entire rock has its place. Otherwise the block would be 160 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK Il'. in the view of science a monstrosity. It is the same with this fragment of J ohannine discourse in the synoptic Gospels. It is fully sufficient to attest the existence, at certain moments, of this so-called Johannine language in the teaching of Jesus. The real difference between John and the Synoptics, on this the most decisive point, amounts to this : while the latter have transmitted to us only one example of this style of language,. John has preserved several, chosen with a particular view. As, on the one hand, it is certain from the very nature of things that the style peculiar to the translator has coloured that of the preacher while reproducing his discourses; on the other hand, the passage of the Synoptics which we have just quoted puts it beyond doubt that the Lord's own language had graven itself deeply on the soul of the evangelist, and exercised a decisive and permanent influence on his style. There was therefore here, if I may so express myself, a reflex action, the-­ secret of which no one certainly will ever completely unveil. Moreover, the discourses of Jesus in the fourth Gospel bear in themselves, for every one that has eyes to see, the seal o:t their true origin, and despite all the affirmations of critics, the <.;hurch will ever know what to think of them. An intimate, filial, unbroken communion with the God of heaven and earth, such as is revealed by the mouth of Jesus, must be lived to be­ so expressed; what do I say ? to be so much as caught in glimpses. The inventor of such discourses would be more than a genius of the first order; he would himself require to­ be Son of God, a Jesus equal to the true Jesus. Criticism only gains au embarrassment more by such a supposition.

C. The Johannine Notion of the Person of Jesiis. Is it possible for us to ascend to the one source, whence, like two divergent streams, flow the two forms of Jesus' teaching which we have just remarked ?-First of all, let us set aside the opinion, widely enough spread in our day, which thinks it can discern a dualism in the very teaching of our Gospel Two critics, Baur and Reuss, have alleged that the author of this book did not hold a real incarnation of the Logos; that, according to him, the divine being continued in Jesus to possess and exercise His heavenly attributes, so that.

..J CHAP. II.j CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 161

His humanity was only a transitory and superficial wrapping, which did not in the least modify the state He had possessed before coming to the earth. Starting from this point of view. Reuss finds in our Gospel a series of contradictions between certain sayings of Jesus he thinks authentic, and the concepthn set forth in the amplifications due to the pen of the evangelist. While, in the former, Jesus distinctly affirms His inferiority to the Father, the author of our Gospel, filled with his notion of the Logos, represents Hirn as equal to God.-It is difficult to conceive a more complete travesty of the Johannine narrative. We have already shown that no Gospel brings out in more pronounced features than this does the real humanity of Jesus, body, soul, and spirit. The body is exhausted (iv. 6) ; the soul is overwhelmed with troiible (xii. 2 7) ; the spirit itself is vehemently disturbed (xiii. 21), and groans (xi 33). What place remains in such a being for the presence of an impass'ive Logos 1 Nay more; according to the prologue, which is surely the work of the evangelist, the Logos Himself in His state of divine pre-existence tends to God as His centre (i. 1); He abides in God as a first-born Son in the bosom, of His Father (i. 18). Where in this picture is the place for a being equal to God 1 No; the subordination of the Son to the Father is affirmed by the evangelist as distinctly as it could be by Jesus speaking of Himself; and as to His real humanity, it is emphasized more forcibly by this same evangelist than by any of the Synoptics. There is not a trace, therefore, of a contradictory double theology in our Gospel.1 This supposition is, from its very nature, the most improbable possible. It involves a fact very difficult to admit; the fact, namely, that a thinker so profound as the author of this book, the most powerful mind of his time, could, without the faintest suspicion of it, teach simul­ taneously two opposite conceptions on the subject which occupied the first place in his thoughts and heart. The idea which the evangelist formed of Christ's person, and which is in perfect harmony with the minutest historical or didactic details of his entire narrative, is clearly expressed by the author in the prologue : "The Word was made flesh," 1 As is now maintained by Bcyschlag; comp. also Jean Reville's thesis, Lt1 Doctriri-ll du Logos, 1881 GODET I. L JOHN. 162 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK It

which evidently signifies that the being whom he calls the Word stripped Himself of His divine state, and of all the attributes which made it up, to exchange it for a completely human state, with all the characteristics of weakness, ignorance, sensibility to pleasure and pain, which make up our manner of life here below.1 This mode of conceiving Christ's person during His sojourn on earth is not peculiar to John ; it is also Paul's, who tells us in Philippians: "He being in the form of God . . . emptied Himself, having taken the form of a servant, and become like unto rrll:m" (ii. 6, 7); and again in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians : " Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that ye, through His poverty, might be rich" (2 Cor. viii. 9). The same teaching in the Epistle to the Hebrews and in the Revelation, at too great length to be produced here.2 Here is the key of all the Christological views in the New Testament. In particular, it is the explanation of that double form of teaching which we find in the mouth of Christ as given in John and the Synoptics. Up to His baptism, Jesus had lived in filial communion with God ; the proof of it is the saying Qf the child at the age of twelve: "Must I not be in wl1at is my Father's'?" (Luke ii 49). But He had not yet the distinct consciousness of His essential eternal relation to the Father; His communion with Him was of a rnora.l nature; it flowed from His pure conscience and His fervent love to Him. In this state He must have had a presentiment of His being the physir.ian of sinful humanity, the Messiah. But an immediate divine testimony was necessary to enable Him to undertake the work of redemption. This testimony was given Him at His baptism; then the heavens were opened to Him ; the heavenly things which He was to reveal to others were unveiled to Him. At the same time the mystery of His own person became clear to Him. He heard the Father's voice saying: "Thou art my well-beloved Son." From that day He knew Himself perfectly, and knowing Himself as the only Son, the object of the Father's full love, He knew also to what extent the Father loved the

1 The same expression is used, ii. 9, to describe the change of water into wirlE: one and the same matter, but putting on different attributes. 2 Comp. Heh, i. 3, ii. 17, 18, v, 6-8; Rev, i. 1, 18, iii. 12, 21, v. 5, CHAP. II.] CHARACi'fERISTlCS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 163 world to which He gave Him. As man, He knew fully the Father Himself, the Father in all the wealth of the meaning of the word. And so from that day He carried heaven in His heart, while living on the earth. He had therefore, if one may so speak, two sources of information: the one, the -experience of earthly things which He had acquired during the thirty years' life which He had just passed as a simple man here below ; the other, the permanent view of heavenly things which had opened up before His sight at the hour of His baptism. What wonder, consequently, if Jesus spoke alternately of the one and the other according to the wants of His hearers, finding in the former the common ground He needed to excite their interest and gain their attention, drawing from the second the object of the new revelation whereby He was to transform the world ? On the one hand were the moral obligations of man, his relations to mundane things, treated from the divine point of view, as we see particularly in the Synoptics ; on the other was the higher mystery of the relation of love between the Father and the Son, and of the love of both to a world sunk in sin and death, a world to which the Father gives the Son and the Son giveD Himself. It seems to me that if we place ourselves at this point of view, we see spring up, as with a sort of moral necessity, the two modes of teaching which amaze science, but not the church. Do we not know of young people or grown men who, after leading a perfectly moral life, see all at once, through the mysterious act of the new birth, the sanctuary of com­ munion with Christ open before them, the life of adoption, the intimate enjoyment of the fatherly love of God ? Their language then takes a new character at certain times which astonishes those who hear them speak, and who ask themselves if it is really the same man. There is in their tone something elevated and sweet which was strange to them before. They are like words coming from a higher region. One might be tempted to exclaim with the poet :

Ah ! qui n'oublierait tout a cette voix celeste Ta parole est un chant • • , but without adding with him: 164 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. LBOOK II~

• . • ou rien d'humain ne reste. 1 F•Jr this divine language is nevertheless the most human which CP.n be spoken. Then, the time of elevation past, the ordinary life resuming its course, the ordinary language is resumed with, it, though always grave, always holy, always controlled by the· immediate relation to God which forms henceforth the back­ ground of the entire life. Such experiences are not rare ; they serve to explain the mystery of the twofold teaching and the­ twofold language of the Word made flesh, from the time when­ Christ was revealed to Himself by the testimony of the­ Father.2 But even if we cannot by thought reach the sublime point, where in the person of Christ the two convergent lines of the­ humanity which rises highest, and of the divinity which, abases itself most deeply, meet together, do we not know that in mathematics no one refuses to acknowledge the reality of. the point where the two lliies called asymptotes meet in infinity,. and that mathematicians work on this point as on a positive quantity? Weiss rightly says :8 "It must indeed be con­ sidered that the appearance of Jesus in itself, as the realization of a divinely human life, was far too rich, too grand, too manifold not to be differently presented according to the various individualities which received its rays, and according to the more or less ideal points of view from which those rays, were reflected ; without this difference, however, being able to­ injure the unity of the fundamental impression and of the essential character under which this personality made itself known. Criticism has frequently made use of the comparison between the discrepancy which we are considering, and that which the Socrates of Xenophon and of Plato present. At. first the current of history flowed on the side of Xenophon, thinking it could recognise the true historical type in the simple, practical, varied, and popular Socrates of the Memora­ bilia. The Socrates of Plato was then regarded only as a. 1 Who would not all forget 'mid those celestial strains! Thy speaking is a song . . . • • . where nought of man remains. , Regarded from this point of view, the fact of the incarnation, whi.e stilL pr<>senting profound mysteries to reason, does not seem to us to contain :iruoluble­ 'lontradictions, • Introduction to his Commentary on tlte Go,pel of John, p. 33. <:HAP. 11.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 1115

mouthpiece chosen by this author to expound his own theory ,of ideas. Xenophon was the historian, Plato the philosopher. But criticism has changed its mind ; Schleiermacher especially bas shown that if the teaching of Socrates had not comprised speculative elements such as those attributed to him by Plato, .and regarding which the other writer is entirely silent, it would have been impossible to account either for the relation which so closely unites the school of Plato to the person of Socrates, or for the extraordinary power of attraction exercised by the latter over the most eminent and speculative minds of his time, or for the profound revolution wrought by him on the progress of Greek thought."1 With Xenophon only there is a blank remaining, a blank which we cannot fill in except with the help of Plato. This fact arises, on the one hand, from the special aim of Xenophon's book, which was to make a moral defence of his master; on the other, from the fact that Xenophon, a practical man, wanted the necessary philosophical grasp to seize the higher elements of the Socratic teaching. Zeller also admits that Xenophon did not understand the cScientific value of Socrates; "that Socrates cannot have been the simple and non-scientific moralist for which he has been so long taken," when judgment proceeded solely on Xenophon's writings. "In the exposition of both writers," says he, "there is a s1trplus (Ueberschuss) which may easily be worked into the common portrait." Undoubtedly Plato has put into the mouth of Socrates his own theory of ideas. But it was only the development of Socrates' own teaching; and it must be confessed that whenever he puts the latter on the stage as a historical personage (in the Apology and the Symposimn, for -example), he does not use the same liberty.2 This parallel mutatis mutandis presents several remarkable .analogies of detail But it offers above all this fundamental analogy, that in the case of Socrates as in that of Jesus, we find ourselves confronted with two faithful portraits of a historical personage, whose perfect synthesis it is impossible to -effect. Now, if philosophy still seeks the fusion of the two oortraits of the wisest of the Greeks, will it be thought sur­ prising if theology has not yet succeeded in combining in one 1 Critics like Brandis and Ritter adhere to this judgment. • Philo8. der Griecl,en, 2d Part, 3rd ed., pp. 85 ff., 151, and 155 166 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IT. the two likenesses of Christ ? Is the richness of the former. of the man whose influence on the moral history of his people was so considerable but so transitory, comparable to the rich­ ness of Him whose appearing renewed, and perpetually renews, the world ? And if there was in the former enough to furnish matter for two portraits, both true and yet irreducible, what wonder if the same phenomenon recurs in regard to Him who could have exclaimed in Greece: A greater than Socrates is here, as He exclaimed in Judea : " A greater than Solomon is here"? " No man knoweth tke Son, save tke Father," says Jesus in the Synoptics. The point in which the two pictures, the Johannine and synoptic, converge, is thus the self.consciousness­ of the Son. We shall certainly not succeed in reconstructing it perfectly here below. We behold one sun in the vault of heaveD ; and yet what a difference between its glowing reflection on the brilliant slopes of the Alpine glaciers and its calm majestic image in the waves of the ocean! The source of light is one, but the two mirrors differ. We conclude- 1. The leading idea of the J obannine writing has not ,;iecessarily impaired its historical character. 2. The trustworthiness of the narrative appears manifestly from the comparison of the work with that of the Synoptics, to which it is uniformly superior in the cases wherein they differ. 3. The trustworthiness of the report of the discourses, which has such strong positive reasons on its side, does not in fact encounter any insurmountable difficulty. The fourth Gospel is therefore a truly historical writing

§ 2. THE RELATION OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL TO THE RELIGION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. Modern criticism thinks it can prove a tendency decidedly hostile to Judaism. Baur thinks that the author wished to imbue the church with anti-Jewish Gnosticism; that he was a Docetist and dualist professing the non-reality of the body of Jesus and the eternal contrast between darkness and light. CHAP, II.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 16 7

Without going so far, Reuss says "that he speaks of the J"ews as a class of foreigners with whom he had no bond of connec­ tion;" that "all that preceded Jesus belongs, according to him, to a past without value, and can only serve to lead men astray, and make them miss the door of salvation (x. 8)." 1 Renan also ascribes to the evangelist a "lively antipathy" to Judaism. Finally, Hilgenfeld is the author who has gone, and still goes, furthest in affirming this thesis. He originally ascribed our Gospel to some Gnostic of the second century; since then he has softened this assertion; he thinks that the author, while belonging to the church, "yet goes a long way with Gnosticism." According to the fourth Gospel, "Judaism belonged, quite as much as paganism, to the darkness which preceded the gospel;" the religion of the Old Testament possessed " only an imperfect and disturbed prefigurement of Christianity." The knowledge of the true God was as much wanting to it as to Samaritan paganisrn.2 What is advanced to justify such criticisms ? First, a few particular terms, familiar to the evangelist, such as : the Jews_. an expression he uses always in a sense hostile to the Jewish people ; or this other: yo1ir law, a term which betrays a feeling of disdain for the Mosaic dispensation and for the whole of the Old Testament.-But the unfavourable meaning attached in our Gospel to the name : the Jews, to denote the enemies of the light, arises from no subjective feeling of the evangelist, but from the fact itself, that is to say, from the position taken up from the beginning (John ii.) toward Jesus by the mass of the nation and its rulers. The author also uses this term when there is occasion (which is rare) in a wholly neutral sense, as ii. 6 (" the purification of the Jews") and xix. 40 (" the manner of the Jews to bury") ; or even in a favourable sense, as in the passages, iv. 2 2 ("salvation is of the Jews ") and xi. 45 (" Many of the Jews who came to Mary believed on Him"). Here may also be cited the use of the name Israelite, applied as a title of honour to Nathanael (i. 48). In the Apocalypse, which is asserted to be an absolutely

1 Theol. johann. pp. 82 and 19. 2 Das Evangelium und die Briefe Joltannis, 1849; compare with his more recent article in the Zeitschrift fur wissenschafaiche 'l'heologie, 1865, and Einleitung, p. 722 ff. 168 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK II.

Judaizing work, the Jews who have rejected the gospel are designated much more severely : " They who call themselves Jews and are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan " (ii. 9 ; comp. iii 9). 1 The great crisis which had cast Israel out of the kingdom of God and made them thenceforth a strange and even hostile body to the church, had already commenced during the ministry of Jesus. This is what the author expresses by the term the Jews, opposed in his narrative to the disciples.-In making Jesus say your law, the evangelist can­ not have had the intention of defaming the Mosaic dispensation, any more than he thought of depreciating the patriarch when he made Jesus say: "Abraham your father" (viii. 5 6). He exalts him, on the contrary, in this very verse by expressing the joyful sympathy which he feels toward Him and His work in a higher state of existence : "Abraham rejoiced in the hope of seeing my day, and be has seen it and is glad." Likewise x. 34, after having used the expression: your law, he immediately adds, in regard to the passage of the Old Testament which he has just quoted, the words: "and since the Scripture cannot be broken," thus making the law a divine 1md infallible revelation. Elsewhere he declares that " it is ,he Scriptures which testify of Him" (v. 39); that the sin of His hearers consists in "not having the word of God abiding in them" (ver. 38), and even that the real cause of their unbelief in Him is nothing else than their unbelief in regard to the writings of Moses (v. 46 and 4 7). The evangelist who makes Jesus speak thus evidently does not seek to defame the law ; the contradiction would be too flagrant. Jesus therefore means, when using the expression your law, "the law which you yourselves acknowledge as the supreme authority;' or "the law which you invoke against me, and in the name of which you seek to condemn me." It must be observed that He could not say " our law," because His personal relation to that insti­ tution differed too much from that of ordinary Jews to be comprehended under the same pronoun ; no more than He could say, when speaking of God, "our Father," but only "m.y ]Father, and your Father" (xx. 17). It has been remarked that Jesus never speaks in this 1 Ewald (Comment. in Apoc. Joh. ad h.l.): "John piquantly calls the Jews an assembly, not of God, but of Satan, as Jesus Hwself does" (John viii. 37-4,ii

-Oospel of the law as the principle on which the life of the new community will rest. True; but this is because He .:assumes that the law has become the inward principle of the life of believers through the fact of their communion with Him. Another ground of objection is the freedom with which .Jesus by His cures violated the Jewish Sabbath. Hilgenfeld tiven discovers the intention of abrogating this institution in the words (v. 17): "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." -As to the Sabbatic cures, they are found in the Synoptics as well as in John, and there, as here, it is those .acts which begin to excite the mortal hatred of the Jews .against Him (Luke vi. 11). But we formally deny that Jesus by these cures really infringed the tenor of the Mosaic com­ mandment. He transgressed nothing but that hedge of arbi­ trary statutes with which the Pharisees had thought good to -surround the fourth commandment. Jesus remained from the beginning to the end, in our Gospel as in the others, the .servant of the circumcision (Rom. xv. 8), that is to say, the -.scrupulous observer of the law. A.s to the words v. 17, they are not contrary to the notion of the Sabbatic rest; they -signify only : " so long as the Father works at the task of man's salvation,-and that work evidently suffers no interrup­ tion at any moment whatever, and still less on the Sabbath -day than on any other,-it is impossible for the Son to fold His arms and leave the Father to wmk alone." This --declaration does not contradict the Sabbatic rest when rightly -understood. Hilgenfeld further alleges the two following passages: iv. 21 and viii. 44. In the former, Jesus says to the Samaritan ·woman: "The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father," which proves, according to him, that Jesus wished to put Himself in opposition to the Jews no less than to the Samaritans, and that consequently when He says in the following verse: "Ye worship ye know not what," this judgment applies to the former as well as to the latter. The Jewish religion would therefore be, according to this saying of Jesus, as erroneous as all the rest. But the following words : " for salvation is of .the Jews," are enough to refute this explanation ; for instead 170 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IL

of this fo?', the author would have required in that case to­ say though : " Though the Jews are as ignorant as you, and as a 11 others, it has pleased God to make salvation proceed from them." The for (on) has no meaning unless in the preceding words Jesus had granted to the Jews a knowledge of God superior to that of the Samaritans. This fact demonstrates­ that the words: "We know what we worship," apply not only to Him, Jesus, personally, but to Him conjointly with aU Israel.1 The true meaning of the words of ver. 21 i& explained by ver. 23 (which is the resuming of ver. 21): '' Your worship, that of you Samaritans, will no longer be· restricted to Mount Gerizim, and neither will it be transported and again localized at Jerusalem." In fact, this latter alter­ native must have appeared to the woman the only possible,. once the former was set aside. In the passage viii. 44, Jesus says to the Jews, according to the ordinary construction : " Ye are of a father the devil." Hilgenfeld translates, as is undoubtedly grammatically possible: ' Ye are of the father of the devil." This father of the devil, according to him, is the God of the Jews, the creator of tl1e material world, who in some Gnostic systems (Ophites,.. Valentinians) was really represented as the father of the­ demon. This is not all; Jesus says at the end of the same verse : " iVhen he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for­ he is a liar, and his father," which is usually understood in the sense: for he is a liar, and the father of the liar (or of the· lie). But Hilgenfeld explains: because he (the devil) is ar liar, and his fathe?" also (is a liar). And here a second time he finds the father of the devil, who is called "a liar as well as his son," because throughout the whole of the Old Testa­ ment the God of the Jews passed Himself off as the supreme God, while He was only an inferior divinity. The author of this explanation is amazed that it could have been thought,, monstrous, and maintains " that not one reasonable word has yet been advanced against it." He should, however, recognise­ the following facts : 1. The father of the devil is a personage quite unknown within the biblical sphere, and the author of our Gospel would have seriously compromised the success oi

1 Jt was only when contrasting Himself with a foreign people (the Samaritans1' that He could say we speakin_g of Himself anu the other Jews, as He does here. CHAP. II.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 171

his fraud by introducing him on the stage. 2. The not10n of two opposed personal gods, the second of them another than the devil, is so opposed to the Israelitish and Christian Mono­ theism professed by the author (v. 44), that it is impossible here to admit such teaching. 3. What Jesus, according to the whole context, wishes to demonstrate to the Jews, is that they are the ehildren of the devil, but not his brethren, as would follow from Hilgenfeld's translation : " Ye are the issue of the father of the devil." In this whole passage the object is to oppose sonship to sonship, father to father. "Ye do what ye have seen with your father," said Jesus (ver. 38). The Jews answered: "We have one father, God" (ver. 41). And the answer of Jesus is the echo of theirs: "Ye are the issue of a father [ who isJ the devil." The first Epistle offers a decisive parallel (iii. 10): "In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil." 4. Finally, let us remark, that if the first words of the verse be applied to the father of the devil, the. whole series of the following proposi­ tions to the last inclusively must necessarily be applied to the same personage. The words : '' Because he is a liar as well as his father," would therefore signify (according to Hilgenfeld's explanation) that: the father of the devil is a liar, and his father as well. After having witnessed the appearance of the devil's father, we should here find ourselves face to face with his grandfather! This whole phantasma­ goria vanishes before a simple comma introduced between the two genitives 7ra-rp6r; (of a father) and -rov oia/30),,,ou (the devil), which puts the second substantive in apposition to the first, not in the place of its complement. The necessity of this explanation from the grammatical point of view follows from the contrast to ver. 41 : " We have a father [ who is J God;" and religiously from ii. 16, where the temple of the God of the Jews at Jerusalem (which, according to Hilgenfeld, should be the house of the devil's father) is called by Jesus "my Father's house." It is certainly therefore, according to om Gospel, the only true God (xvii. 3) who is worshipped at Jerusalem. Hilgenfeld and Reuss rest their position on another saying, x. 8: "All that came before me are thieves and robbers;" thev think that Jesus intended by these two terms to describe 172 ANALYSTS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK II. all the eminent men of the Old Testament. Who then ? the patriarchs and Moses, the psalmists and prophets? And that in a book in which the author makes Jesus say that to believe Moses is implicitly to believe in Him (eh. v. 46, 47), in which he himself declares that Isaiah in a vision beheld the glory of the Logos before His incarnation, and announced the unbelief of the people in regard to the Messiah (xii. 38, 41) ; in which the saying of a psalmist is quoted as a word of God which cannot be broken (x. 34, 35); in which Abraham is represented as rejoicing at the sight of the advent of Christ (viii. 56) ! No; the language quoted applies simply to the actual rulers of the nation, who were now for a time i11 possession of power when Jesus was carrying through His work in Israel. This is clearly brought out by the verb in the present : ela-t, are, and not: were, as the word is some­ times rather stupidly translated : " They that came before me are thieves and robbers." Reuss alleges that in general not .a word in this book connects the church in a more particular way with Judaism ; and Hilgenfeld affirms that this book " breaks every bond between Christianity and its Jewish roots." And yet the latter of these critics cannot help admitting what the former vainly seeks to deny: that in the saying (i. 11) : "He came to His own, and His own received Him not," the author really speaks of the Jews, considering them, he adds himself, "as the people of God or of the Logos." 1 No doubt he seeks after­ wards to evade the consequences of this conclusive fact, but by means of subterfuges which do not deserve even J;o be mentioned. Besides, let the following facts be weighed: the temple of Jerusalem is the house of the Fatke1· of Jesus Christ (ii. 16); salvation is of the Jews (iv. 22) ; the sheep whom Jesus brings from the theocracy constitute the nucleus of the true Messianic flock (x. 16); the paschal lamb slain at Jeru­ salem prefigures the sacrifice of the Messiah even to this slight detail, that the bones of both must be preserved unbroken (xix. 36); the most striking testimony of the Father in favour of Jesus is that rendered to Him by the Scriptures of the Old Testament (v. 3 9). Finally, the author himself declares that he wrote his book to prove that Jesus is not 1 Eiv.leitung, p. 723. CHAP. II.] CIIARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 17 ,o; only the Son of God, as He is made to say so often, but faRt of all the Ghrist, the Messiah promised to the Jews (xx. 30. 31 ).1 The Messianic character of Jesus is expressly exhibited before His divine character. From one end to the other, our Gospel makes the appearance and work of Jesus the last evolution, the consummation of the Old Testament. As to all the passages advanced by Hilgenfeld with the view of proving that Jesus denies to Judaism all true knowledge or God (vii. 2·s, viii 19, xv. 21, xvi. 25, etc.), they prove nothing whatever; it is not the Jewish religion as such, it is the carnal and proud Jews who surround Him who are addressed with the often-repeated charge of not knowing God, the God who notwithstanding had revealed Himself to them. The prophets had all spoken in the same way, and distinguished from the mass of the people (this people, Isa. vi. 10) the elect, "the holy remnant " (vi. 13). Surely they were not on that account anti-Jewish. The charge of dualism, brought against our Gospel particu­ larly by Hilgenfeld, falls to the ground before this simple 2 remark of Hase: " Hereby a moral relation is falsely trans­ lated into a metaphysical relation." Must we see a dualistic notion in this saying of Jesus: "Unto you, it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom ; but imto them it is not given" 1 (Matt. xiii. 11), or in this other (Matt. xiii 38): "The good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one " ? or yet again in the contrast established by St. Paul, 1 Cor. ii. 14, 15, between the psychical man who cannot understand spiritual things, and the pneuma­ tical man who judges all things? Who ever dreamt, on account of such sayings, of imputing to Jesus and Paul the idea of two human races, the one proceeding from God, the other from the devil? Scripture teaches throughout that a holy power and an evil power act simultaneously on man's heart, and that he can give himself up freely to either. The more the choice is confirmed in the one direction or the other, the more does

1 lt is curious to observe how, in the quotation of this passage, our critic& sometimes render themselves guilty of a thoughtless inaccuracy by rejecting the term : the Christ; comp. Sabatier, Encyclop. p. 184. There are other examples of the same. 2 Geschichte Jesu, p. ,4. 174 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK JI. the man find himself given over to the moral current which bears him along, and thus it may happen that in the way of evil one may'become incapable of any longer discerning and feeling the attraction of goodness. Such is the incapacity with which Jesus so often charges the Jews; it is their own doing; otherwise why reproach them with it, and to what purpose would it be to call them again to repentance and renewal by faith 1 This hardening is only relative, because it is volun­ tary; so Jesus declares most expressly in His profound explanation of Jewish unbelief (v. 44): "How can ye believe who take honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only ? " If, therefore, they cannot believe, it is because they will not, because they have made themselves the slaves of an interest opposed to the advantages procured by faith, that of human glory. Such dualism is moral, the effect of will, not metaphysical or founded on nature. If he taught otherwise, the author would contradict himself; for has he not said in the prologue that " all things were made by the Logos, and without Him was not anything made that was made" 1 Hilgenfeld no doubt alleges that the existence of dark­ ness (i. 5) not having been accounted for by anything, supposes the eternity of the evil principle ; but after what precedes (the creation, the primitive state) it is quite natural to find there the appearance of evil in humanity, the fall as it is related after the creation in the account of Genesis, which the author follows as it were step by step. Baur found in our Gospel the spirit of Gnostic IJocetiMn, which, no less than dualism, would be in contradiction to the spirit of the Old Testament. But every one seems now to have abandoned this opinion, and we think we can leave with exegesis the care of demonstrating its groundlessness.1 To support it one must torture the meaning of the word in which the whole writing is summed up: "The Word was made flesh," and reduce its force to this idea: The Word was clothed with a bodily appearance. The whole of the fourth Gospel rejects this mode of explaining the incarnation, which is also, up to a certain point, that which Reuss ascribes to it. A being who is wearied, who thirsts, whose soul is troubled at the approach of suffering, and who must be preserved by 1 See on the passages vii. 10 and viii. 59. -CHAP. II.l CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEJ,. 175

-extraordinary circumstances from the breaking of His bones ; .a being who rises again,. and who says : "Touch me not," or also: "Reach hither thy finger," has certainly a real and material body, or the author does not know what he is saying. Finally, in the opposition of our Gospel to Ohiliasni, Hilgenfeld discovers a proof of its anti-Jewish spirit. "The whole Gospel," says this writer, "is so planned as to present the historical advent of Christ as His only appearance on the tiarth." But, in the first place, it is false to regard Chiliasm, the waiting for a final reign of Christ among mankind, as the -evidence of a J udaizing tendency. Hase rightly says: "This was the faith of almost the whole church in the second century, and even till far on in the third." But, moreover, as the same author adds, "our Gospel, while turning away the expectations of men from all that flatters the senses, -does not contradict this hope." We have seen this indeed; mention is made1 again and again of a glorious resurrection of the body which is promised to believers, and of a last day. But here, as in everything, John has set himself to bring out the spiritual preparation on which the Synoptics had not rested, rather than the external results, so vividly and strikingly described by the latter. In this chapter we have developed only the points relating to the characterization of our Gospel, without touching on what enters into the question of its origin, of its composition by this author or that. In studying this latter subject we shall iclxamine the origin of the notion and of the term Logos. What concerned us here was to establish the relation between our Gospel and the Old Testament. This relation we have found is twofold : on the one hand, the J ohannine Gospel fully recognises the divinity of the Old Testament law and prophets; on the other, it sees in Christ's work and teaching a decided superiority over the old revelations. The God of Israel is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but the -patriarchal and prophetic revelations made Him known only imperfectly. It is the only-begotten Son, abiding in His bosom, who has come to reveal Him to us. "The law was given by Moses ; " it prepared its faithful subjects to receive .Jesus Christ, but it is only in Him that there is granted to the believer a divine "fulness of grace and truth" (i. lG -18). 176 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. (BOOK I.ll

In Israel the word had its home, early prepared on the earth ; but the new birth by which a man obtains the life of God is­ only possible through faith in the Word manifest in the flesh, (i. 12, 13). The evangelist began by recognising in Jesus the promised Christ ; thence he rose to the knowlectge of the Son of God (i. 41, vi. 69, xvi. 28, 29). The words xx. 31 sum up this­ development.

§ 3. 'THE STYLE OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. It now remains for us to consider our Gospel from a. literary point of view. Tholuck, in the introduction to his brief commentary, has well brought out the unique character of the evangelist's language. There is nothing analogous to, it in the whole of sacred or profane literature. Childlike simplicity and transparent depth, a holy melancholy, and a vivacity not less holy; above all, the sweetness of a pure­ and gentle love,-such a style can only emanate, says Hase, from a life which rests in God, and in which all opposition between the present and the future, between the divine and the hnman, has entirely come to an end. Let us seek to state precisely the peculiarities of this style.1 1. The vocabulary, in its sum total, is poor. It is, in general, the same expressions which are reproduced from one end to the other: light ( if,&r;), 2 3 times; glm·y, to be glorified ( So~a, oo~atea0ai), 42 times; life, to live (sroJJ, ti}v), 5 2 times; to testify, testimony (µ,apTVpeZv, µapTvpla), 4 7 times; to know (rywwa,mv), 55 times; world (,couµor;), 78 times; to believe (marn5eiv), 98 times; work (lfpryov), 23 times; name (8voµ,a),. and truth (a)vYJ0ela), each 25 times; sign (u'YJp,efov), 17 times. Not only is the author not afraid to repeat these words in his writing, but he does so, and repeatedly, in sentences very closely resem'oling each other. At the first glance, this gives a character of monotony to his style; but only at the first glance. These expressions very soon make amends to the­ reader for their small number by their intrinsic wealth. They

, It is impossible to treat this subject with more acuteness and delicacy than, !..uthardt has done in the introduction to his commentary, 2d ed. 1875, 1st vol.. pp. 14-62. CHAP. II.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 177 ure not purely abstract notions, as is thought at first sight, but powerful spiritual realities, which may be studied under a multitude of aspects. If the author has only a few terms in his vocabulary, these terms may be compared to the pieces of gold with which great lords make payment. This feature is in keeping with the Eastern mind, which loves to lose itself in the infinite. The Old Testament already knows these so rich expressions, and their profound meaning : light, da1·kness, truth, lie, glory, name, life, death. 2. Certain favourite forms which, without exactly coming into collision with the laws of the Greek language, are never­ theless foreign to that language, and betray a Hebrew turn of thought. Thus, to designate the closest spiritual union, the use of the term know ; to indicate moral dependence in regard to another being, the terms be in (elvai Jv), dwell in (µ,€vew Jv); to characterize the relation between a spiritual principle and the person in whom it becomes incarnate, the expression "son" (the son of perdition, vioi;; Ti}<; a'!l'"roA.e{ai;;); certain forms of purely Hebraic origin; to rejoice with joy (xapc;, xa{pew), for ever (eli;; Tov alwva); :finally, Hebrew words changed into Greek words, as in the formula: .A.men, amen (aµ,iJv, aµ,,jv), which is only found in John. 3. The construction is simple; the ideas are rather placed in juxtaposition, than organically fitted in according to the arts of Greek construction. This distinctive feature is especi­ ally observable in some striking instances (i 10, ii 9, iii. 19, vi. 22-24, viii. 32, xvii. 25), where it would not have been difficult to compose a truly syntactic sentence, as a Greek writer would certainly have done. With this altogether Hebraic form are in like manner connected those frequent anacolutka, according to which the dominant idea is first of all placed at the beginning, by means of an absolute sub­ stantive, then repeated afterwards by a pronoun regularly construed; comp. vi. 39, vii. 38, xvii. 2. We know that such instances are still more frequent in the .Apocalypse. 4. Notwithstanding the wealth of particles characteristic of the Greek language, the author makes use only of the 1ww (0€), more frequently of the and («:at), the then (ovv), and the as (wi;; or «:a0wi;;). The µ,ev, so common in Greek, is some­ what rare (8 times) in his writing. The and and the then GODEl' L M JOHN 178 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK II, replace the Vav conversive, which is almost the only Hebrew particle. The " then " brings out the providential necessity which, in the eyes of the author, unites the facts; the "and" is often employed in those cases where the particle of opposi­ tion, "but," might be expected; for instance: "The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not" (i. 5); o-r: "But now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father" (xv. 24); "We speak that we do know, and ye receive not our witness " (iii. 11 ). Luthardt acutely observes that such a form emanates from a mind which has overcome the first emotion of surprise or indigna­ tion produced by an unforeseen result, and which henceforth contemplates it with the calmness of indifference, or with a grief without bitterness. The use of the particle "as" (comp. for instance, eh. xvii.) is inspired by the necessity of draw­ ing out the analogies; this is one of the most characteristic features of the mind which has created this style. This tendency goes even so far as to identify the earthly symbols of divine things with the latter : " I am the true vine ; " " I am the good shepherd." The reality is not, in the eyes of him who thus writes, the earthly phenomenon, but the divine invisible fact, of which the sensible phenomenon is only the copy. The author likewise very frequently employs the conjun c­ tion "in order that" (rva) in a weakened sense, and one which would seem to reduce it to the mere idea of the Latin ita ut: "so that;" but we think, with Meyer, that this is only in appearance. In those cases it is a divine object which is in question. And here again a feature of his turn of mind reveals itself: the teleological tendency which belongs to the spirit of sacred historiography. What, in the eyes of men, seems only a historical rr,SUlt, appears, from a loftier point of view, as the realization of the purpose of God. 5. A strange contrast has been observed in the narrative forms. On the one hand, something slow, diffuse, for instance, that form so frequent in the dialogues : "He answered and said;" or the repetition of proper names, John, Jesus, in those places where a Greek writer would have employed the pronoun (which also belongs to the Oriental stamp of style ; Winer, Grammar of New Testament, sec. 65 [E.T. p. 752 ff.]); CHAP. II.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 1 7~ or, again, that dragging construction, in virtue of which, aftm· the statement of a fact, there comes a participle with its dependence, intended to throw a clearer light on one of the sides of the fact mentioned (comp. i 12, iii. 13, v. 18, vi. 71, vii. 50); or, finally, instead of the finite verb, the heavier form of the verb to be, with the participle,-a form for which in certain cases there may be a reason, as in classic writers, but which is too often employed here not to be, as Thiersch •Observes, a reproduction of the analogous form peculiar to Aramaic ;-and, on the other hand, the frequent appearance •Of short propositions, which break up the sentence as by an abrupt interruption: "Now Barabbas was a robber" (xviii. 40); "And it was night" (xiii. 30); "It was the tenth hour" (i. 40); "And on the same day was the Sabbath" (v. 9) ; "Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister" (xi. 5) ; .. , Jesus wept" (xi. 35). These are the jets of an internal fire which, by its sudden explosions, breaks the habitual calm of serene contemplation. Such really is the Semite; an exciting recollection is enough to drag him all at once from the calm majesty with which he usually thinks fit to surround himself 6. ln regard to the way in which the ideas are connected, we remark three characteristic features: Either, as we have seen, a brief, summary word is laid down as a centre, and around it there is unfolded a series of cycles, exhausting more and more, down to its most concrete applications, the primary idea. Or else it is a whole series of propositions without external connection, as in the first twenty verses of eh. xv., which follow one another by asyndeton; it seems as if each thought had all its force in itself, and deserved to be studied apart. Or else, finally, it is a connection of a particular nature, which results from the repetition, in the following proposition, of one of the principal words of the preceding,­ for instance, x. 11, xiii. 20, xvii. 2, 3, 9, 11, 15, 16, and, above all, i. 1-5. Each proposition is thus like a ring linked with the preceding ring. The first two forms are repugnant to the Greek genius, the third is borrowed from the Old Testament (Ps. cxxi. and Gen. i. 1 ff.). 7. We have already pointed out the :figurative character of the style ; let us here add its profoundly symbolical character ; >thus the expressions to draw, to teaeh, in speaking of God ; see, 180 ANALYSIS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK II. hear, in speaking of the relation of Christ to the invisible world; to hunger, thirst, in a spiritual sense. Such is ever the Oriental and specially the Hebraic stamp. 8. We shall merely cite two features more : the parallelism of the propositions, which is known to be the distinctive sign of the poetical style among the Hebrews, and the refrain,, which is in like manner employed by them. On all the­ occasions when the feeling of the speaker is elevated, or his soul greatly moved, by the contemplation of a lofty truth, to, which he is bearing witness, these two forms appear in the Old Testament. It is exactly the same in John. For the parallelism, comp. iii. 11, v. 37, vi. 35, 55, 56, xii. 44, 45, xiii. 16, xv. 20, xvi. 28; for the refrain, iii. 15, 16, vi. 39, 40, 44; oomp. Gen. i: "And the evening was," etc.; Amos L and ii. ; and elsewhere, especially in the Psalms. What judgment, then, are we to pass on the style and literary character of this work 1 On the one hand, Renan tells us: "The style contains nothing that is Hebraic, Jewish, or Talmudic." And he is right, if by style we simply under­ stand the wholly external forms of the language. There is not to be found in the fourth Gospel, as in certain parts of Luke (the first two chapters, from the 5th verse), for example, Hebraisms properly so called, imported just as they are into, the Greek text, the Vav conversive, for example, nor, as in the translation of the LXX., Hebrew terms of expression clumsily Hellenized. On the other hand, a scholar, who has not less profoundly studied the spirit of the Semitic languages, Ewald, thus expresses himself: "No language can be, in respect of the spirit and breath which animate it, more­ purely Hebraic than that of our author." And he is equally right, if we consider the internal qualities of the style; the whole of our preceding study has sufficiently demonstrated this. In John's language, the clothing alone is Greek, the body is Hebrew; or, as Luthardt says, there is a Hebrew soul in the Greek language of the evangelist. Keim has devoted to. the style of the fourth Gospel a beautiful page ; he sees in it "the ease and flexibility of the purest Hellenism adapted to the Hebrew mode of expression, with all its candour, simplicity, profusion of imagery, and sometimes also its ..:iilAP. H.] CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 181

.awkwardness. No research, no pathos: all in it is simple cand flowing as in life; but everywhere, at the same time, .acuteness, variety, progress, - features scarcely indicated, which form themselves into a picture in the mind of the reflective reader. Everywhere are mysteries which surround you and are on the watch for you; signs and symbols which could not be taken literally, if the author had not affirmed their reality; accidents and minute details, which are found to be, all at once, full of meaning; cordiality, calmness, harmony ; in the midst of struggles, grief, zeal, anger, irony ; finally, at the end, at the farewell meal, on the cross, and in the resurrection, peace, victory, grandeur." From this study of the Historiographic, Theological, and Literary characteristics of our Gospel, it appears : 1. That the narrative of the fourth Gospel, both as to its facts ~nd discourses, bears the seal of historical truthfulness. 2. Th.. t-. while indicating the progress of the Gospel beyond the relig10.c:. -.:.,f the Old Testament, it asserts the complete harmony of the two Testaments. 3. That the .style, ....,hile Greek in iliS forllllS, is yet Hebrew in essence. BOOK THIRD.

THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL.

E come to the principal subject of this investigation­ W the mode in which the work before us was composed. This subiect embraces the four following points: 1st, The i,poca at which this book was composed; 2d, The author to whom it is to be ascribed; 3d, The place where it was produced; 4th, The aim which presided over its composition. The means at our disposal for resolving these different questions are, besides the indications contained in the book itself, the information we derive from the remains of the religious literature of the second century, from the canonical collections of the churches of that period, and from the facts of the primitive history of Christianity. The remains of the literature of the second century are far from numerous ; they are like the fragments of a wreck. They are, first, the letter of Clement of Rome to the church of Corinth, about the end of the first century, or at the beginning of the second, and the so-called Epistle of Barnabas, belonging to the same epoch. Thereafter come the letters of Ignatius, belonging to the first years of the second century, the whole or partial authenticity of which is admitted, and the letter of Polycarp to the Philippians, of a somewhat later date, but with the same reserve. Next come the Pastor of Hermas, the letter of Diognetus, and a homily which bears the name of the Second Epistle of Clement. The date of all these writings is variously fixed. We next come to the writings of tlw Apologists about the middle of the century: Justin Martyr with his three principal writings ; Tatian his disciple; dthenagoras with his apology addressed to Marcus Aurelius; lSO 184 TIIR ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III.

Theophilus and his writing addressed to Autolycus ; Melitc• aud Apollinaris with the few fragments which remain of their writings; finally, Irenceus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian of Carthage, who form the transition to tho third century. All these writers belong to the orthodox line. Parallel to them in the heretical line we find Basilides and his school ; Manion; then Valentinus with his four principal disciples, Ptolemceus, Heradeon, Marcus, and Theodotus, all authors of many works, some fragments of which we read in Irenreus, Tertullian, Clement, and Hippolytus ; the work of the last mentioned recently recovered, and entitled Philosophumena, is particularly important. Let us mention, finally, the Judeo­ Christian romance called Clementine Homilies. The canonical collections of this period known to us are three in number: that of the Syriac church in the translation called Pesehito; that of the Latin church in the translation which bears the name Itala, and the so-called Fragment of Muratori, which represents the canon of some Italian or African church towards the middle of the second century. It is by means of all these documents, as well as of tho indications contained in the Gospel itself, that we shall havo to choose between the four following principal dates assigned by criticism at the present day to the composition of our Gospel.

CHAPTER L

THE TIME,

The traditional opinion, by ascribing this book to th,? Apostle John, thereby places its composition in the first century, towards the end of the apostolic age. At the opposite extreme from this traditional date, is that for which Baur, the head of the Tiibingen school, has given his voice. According to him, our work was composed between 160 and 170; he connects its origin particularly with the Paschal dispute which broke out at that period. Baur's disciples gradually moved the date of composition backwards to the period 130-155: Volkmar, about 155; .CHAP. I.] THE TIME, 185

Zeller and Scholten, 150; Hilgenfeld, 130-140; thus nearly a quarter of a century earlier than Baur thought. This arises from the fact that several of those writers connect the composition of our Gospel with the efflorescence of Gnosticism, about 140. Many critics now make a new step backwards. Holtzmann ,considers our Gospel as contemporaneous with the Epistle of Barnabas; Schenkel speaks of 115-120; Nicolas, Renan, W eizsacker, Reuss, Sabatier, all regard the fourth Gospel as a production of the school in which the J ohannine traditions were preserved at Ephesus, and fix its composition in the first ,quarter of the second century. This was also Keim's opinion, when in 1867 he published his great work, History of Jesu,s of Nazara; he indicated as the date the years 100-120 (p. 146), and more precisely, from 110-115 (p. 155). Since then, in his popular editions, he has returned to Hilgenfeld's date (130). Such are the four situations proposed which we must now submit to the test of facts. Shall we begin with the most advanced or with the earliest 1 In our previous edition, we adopted the former of these two courses. Here we have been charged with a defect of logic, since the facts which speak against the older dates are proofs, a fortiori, against the most recent, and yet are not mentioned till after the discussion of the latter has taken place.1 True ; but we have confidence .enough in the logic of our readers to hope that they will themselves make this calculation, and that when, for example, in discussing the date 140, they come on a fact which ,demonstrates it to be too late, they will not fail to add this fact to those by which the more recent dates had already been refuted. We continue to prefer the chronologically retro­ ,gressive course, because, as Weizsacker has been pleased to acknowledge, it gives more interest to the exposition of the facts. In the progressive order, every fact testifying in favour -of an older date renders the discussion of the later dates superfluous. 160-170.-BAUR. Eusebius declared, in the first part of the fourth century i.,H. E. iii. 24), " that the Gospel according to John, known in 1 Review in the Ohrotien evangelique, by Professor Ch. Porret-. 186 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III. all churches which are under heaven, should be admitted into, the first rank," and he placed it accordingly among the­ writings which he calls Homologournena, that is to say, universally accepted by the churches and their teachers. When he thus spoke, he had before him the entire literature­ of the preceding centuries collected in the libraries of his predecessor Pamphilus at Cresarea, and of the bishop Alexander at J ernsalem. His declaration proves that, in studying those· writings, he had found no blank in the testimonies proving the use of our Gospel by the Fathers and the churches· of the first three centuries. It must be remembered here with what precision and frankness Eusebius mentions the slightest traces of vacillation of opinion in regard to the biblical books,-for instance, he does not fail to indicate the omission of any quotation from the Epistle to the Hebrews in the great work of Irem:eus (an omission which we can still prove ourselves),. though this Epistle takes rank, according to him, among the fourteen Epistles of St. Paul. Suppose he had found in the­ patristic literature, to the date of 160-170, a complete blank with regard to the existence and use of our Gospel, could he­ at all in good faith have expressed himself as he does in the­ passage quoted ? Origen, about 220, includes our Gospel in the number of the four " which alone are received without dispute in the church of God which is under heaven" (in Eusebius, H. E. vi. 25). Would this place have been so unanimously accorded to it if it had only been known from 170? No doubt, Eusebius and Origen are not the bearers of the· tradition ; but they are the founders of criticism who grouped the notices of the preceding centuries, and made out from them the foregoing result. Clement of Alexandria, the master of Origen, is already in a somewhat different position; he drew his information from the presbyters, the series of whom goes back to the apostles­ (a7ro TWV avl,ca0Ev 7rpEafJu-rEpruv). In thus speaking, he has­ especially in view Pantrenus, a missionary in India, and who died in 189. The following is the information which reached him through those venerable witnesses : " John, received the first three Gospels, and observing that thev comprised the bodily things [the external facts] in the life uf. CHAP, 1.1 THE TIME. 187 the Lord, he, at the instance of eminent men in the church, wrote a spiritual Gospel" (Eusebius, H. E vi. 14). Could Clement, who wrote about 190, have thus spoken of a work which had only been from twenty to twenty-five years in existence 1 He must himself have invented the tradition. Let us add that in another passage (Strom. iii. p. 46 5), when, quoting a saying of Jesus contained in a non-canonical Gospel called the Gospel of the Egyptians, he makes this reservation : " That we do not find this saying in the four Gospels which have been transmitted to us" (ev 'TOt~ 7rapaoeooµ,evo,~ T}JJ,tV 'TET'TapU'iV evfU'frye">,,{ow). The contrast which Clement lays down here clearly shows that from the point of view of tradition, there was an entire difference between the Gospel of John and a Gospel such as that of the Egyptians. Tertullian, born about 16 0, brings forward numerous quotations from our Gospel as forming an authority through­ out the whole church. Would that be possible if this Father and this book were born in the same year, the one in Asia, the other in Africa 1 Let us observe that he quotes it from a Latin translation, of which he says (Adv. Prax.) : "It is in use among ours" (In usu est nostrorum). And not only was it in use and so respected, that Tertullian did not feel himself at liberty to deviate from it even when he does not agree with it,1 but, moreover, this Latin translation had already replaced another and older one, of which Tertullian says (De Afonogam. c. 11): "That it has fallen into disuse" (In usum exiit). And all this could have taken place between this Father's birth and the time when he wrote ! Irenreus wrote his great work, Against Heresies, in Gaul about 185. In it he quotes our Gospel more than sixty times, with the entire conviction of its apostolic origin. He who does so was born in Asia Minor about the year 130, and passed hjg youth there at the school of Polycarp, the friend and disciple of St. John. How could he, without bad faith, date from the apostolic age a Gospel which had not been in existence more than 15-2 0 years at the time he wrote, and of which he had never heard in the churches where he had passed his youth, and which must have been the cradle of the 1 Ronsch, Das Sprachidiom der urchristlichen Itala und der katholischccn Vtilgata, 1869, pp. 2-4. 188 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III. work in question ?-In 177, Irenreus composed a letter on the part of the churckes of Vienne and Lyons to those of Asia and Phrygia, for the purpose of relating to them the persecu­ tion to which they had recently been subjected under Marcus Aurelius. This letter has been preserved to us by Ensebius (H. E. v. 1). It says, speaking of one of the martyrs: "Having the Paraclete within him," and in another passage : " Thus were fulfilled the words spoken by our Lord, that ' the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.' " These are two quotations from John (xiv. 26 and xvi. 2). Thus, in Gaul, ten years after the date assigned to it by Baur, our Gospel was quoted as a writing possessing canonical authority l About 18 0, Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, addressed to his heathen friend Autolycus an apology for Christianity. He quotes in it John's prologue in these words (ii. 22): "That is what we learn from the sacred writings, and from all men animated by the Spirit, amongst whom John says" (there follows John i. 1 ). Is it to be supposed that fifteen to twenty years only after the appearance of our Gospel, the Bishop of Antioch spoke of it thus ? He ranked it so thoroughly with the three others, received everywhere from the first, that he had published a Harmony of the Gospds, which Jerome describes to ns (De Vir. 25) as "collecting into one single writing the words of the four Gospels " ( Quatuor evangeliorum in unum opus dieta compingens). True, the adversaries of the authen­ ticity make capital of the circumstance, that this is the first time that the author of our Gospel is designated by name. But what is proved by a circumstance so purely accidental? Irenreus is the first ecclesiastical writer who names St. Paul as the author of the Epistle to the Romans. Must we conclude from this that the conviction of the apostolic origin of the Epistle to the Romans was only then in course of formation in the consciousness of the church ? The habit of quoting the author by name was as unusual up to that time as that of quoting textually. Apollinaris, Bishop of Hierapolis, controverted, about I 70, the opinion of those who, on the authority of Matthew's Gospel, celebrated the Christian Passover on the evening of the 14th Nisan. at the same time that the Jews ate thA CHAP. I.] THE Tll\1E. 189

Paschal feast, as if Jesus had eaten the Passover on that evening with His disciples, and had not been crucified till the next day. To this the answer of Apollinaris was twofold :1 1. That this view "was in contradiction to the law," for, according to the law, the Paschal lamb was slain on the 14th, not the 15th,-on that day, consequently, Christ must have died ; 2. That if this view were well founded, " the Gospels would contradict each other." This second remark can only refer to the narrative of John's Gospel, which places the death of Jesus on the 14th, not on the 15th, as the Synoptics seem to do. It was thus that in 1 70 Apollinaris relied on the fourth Gospel as a perfectly recognised authority, even by his adversaries, and it was at that same period that, according to Baur, it began to circulate as a wholly new work l This critic, no doubt, has sought to wrest this passage from its natural meaning, but the attempt has been unanimously set aside. The same Apollinaris, moreover, quotes the fourth Gospel in another passage. He calls Jesus, " He whose blessed side was pierced, and who poured forth from His ~ide water and blood, the Word and the Spirit; " 2 comp. John xix. 34. At the same period Melito, bishop of Sardis, also wrote on the same subject. Otto (in the Corpus apologet., book ix.) published a fragment of this Father, in which it is said that " Jesus being, at the same time, perfect God and man, proved His divinity by His miracles in, the three years which followed His baptism, and His humanity during the thirty years which preceded it." The indication of the three years, as the duration of the ministry of Jesus, could only proceed from the J ohannine narrative. About the same time (in 176) Athenagoras thus expresses himself in his apology addressed to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius: "The Son of God," he says, "is the Word of the Father. By Him were all things made." Here is an undeniable quotation; Volkmar himself admits it. The same use of the fourth Gospel by the heretics of this period, particularly by the disciples of Valentinus. One of

1 Chron. Paschale, ed. Dindorf, i. p. 14 : 3fo i#u~q,,,,,J, .-, ••~"I ;, ,~,,..., ,.;,-r;;,, eoc.t ,r

160,1 speak as follows: "This is why the true prophet said, I am the door of life (17 'lT"vivq T1}>' t~.-); he who enters by me enters into life ... My sheep hear my voice (Ta. eµ,a 1rp6f]am &KOU€£ Tijr; eµ,nr; cf,wv1Jc;)" (Hom. Olem. iii. 52). Here is an evident quotation from John x. 3, 9, 27; but it was not enough to bring Baur, Scholten, Volkmar, Hilgenfeld, {ltc., to admit the use of the J ohannine Gospel by the fiery J udaizing writer who composed this pamphlet against the doctrine and person of St. Paul. There was needed the -discovery made by Dressel in 18 5 3 of the previously unknown conclusion of that book to cut short all critical subterfuges. In the 19th homily, eh. 22, there is found this indisputable quotation from the history of the man who was born blind (John ix.). "It is for this reason also that our Lord replied to those who questioned Him, and who asked Him : Who did s,n, this man or his parents, that he was born blind ? Neither bath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that by him the power of God should be made manifest, curing the faults of ignorance." The slight modifi­ ~ation which the author of the Homilies makes in the last words of this J ohannine saying, is in connection with the particular idea which he seeks to bring out in this passage. If Volkmar finds here a reason for still holding out notwith­ standing such a quotation, Hilgenfeld, on the contrary, frankly says (Einl. p. 734): "John's Gospel is made use of without scruple, even by the opponents of the divinity of Christ, such a.; the author of the Clementines." What authority, then, should belong to a book which was thus used by the very opponents of the teaching contained in it ! Such was the state of things in 16 0, and Baur attempts to make out that this work was composed between 16 0 and 170 ! A pagan philosopher, Celsus, wrote a book, entitled The True IJocfrine ('>.6,yor; &:>..710f;), to combat Christianity; he wished, he said, "to slay the Christians with their own sword,"-that is to say, to refute Christianity by the writings of the disciples of its founder. He therefore set out in his work from the universally acknowledged authenticity of our Gospels. Did he also make use of the fourth Gospel for this purpose ? Certainly ; he recalls the passage in John 1 Keim himself, vol. i. p. 137. 192 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK ii. 18, where the Jews in the temple asked Jesus to prove, by some sign, that He was the Son of God (John ii. 18). He­ compares the water and the blood, issuing from the body oi Jesus on the cross (John xix. 34), to the sacred blood which the mythological accounts made to flow from the body of the­ blessed gods. He speaks of the appearance to Mary Magdalene (that half-witted woman ['ITlipoL

1 Ursprung unserer Evangelien, p. 80. 2 Wann wurden unsere .l!Jvangelien verfasst, pp. 73 and 74. GHAP. L] THE TIME. 193

published by Cureton, that this translation called Peschito, and which included the Old Testament as well as the New had already been preceded by a still older one.1-At the sam: time, at the opposite extremity of the church, in Italy, Gaul, and the province of Africa, there already existed the Latin translation of which we have spoken in connection with Tertullian. In this canonical collection, which embraced also the Old Testament, the writings of the New Testament seem to have been divided into five groups: (1) the body of the four 0ospels, the evangelic instrunient (or case) ; then the apostolic instruments, to wit: (2) that of the Acts; (3) that of Paul; ( 4) that of John (Apocalypse and 1st John); (5) a group of disputed writings (1 Peter, Hebrews, Jude). Is it possible to suppose that in the last quarter of the second century, a writing which had not appeared until between 160 and 170 had already been translated into Syriac and Latin, and had gained canonical dignity in countries which formed, so to speak, the antipodes of the church 1 Then comes, between 160 and 170, the famous document recovered in the last century by Muratori in the library of Milan, and which bears the name of that savant. It is a treatise on the writings which purport to have been publicly used in the churches. The author shows the custom of the church of Italy or Africa to which he belongs. The Gospel of John is mentioned as the fourth. The author gives some details respecting the way in which it was composed by the Apostle John, and states some of its peculiarities. And this was written in Italy or Africa at the very date which Baur assigns to the composition of the Gospel ! After the enumeration of these facts, no one will be surprised that the so-called critical school has judged it impossible to hold the position chosen by the master. It has made a retreat along its whole line, and sought a more tenable situation by moving backwards in the second century. Before following it, let us make it clear that between 16 0 and 170 the fourth Gospel existed in Greek, Latin, and Syriac, and that it was read publicly in all the churches, from Mesopotamia to Gaul. Such facts imply, not two or three ' Remains of a very Ancient Recension, etc. London 1858. GODET I, N JO.liN, 194 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IIL decades of years only, but existence at least for half a century.

130-155.-VOLKMAR, 155; ZELLER,SCHOLTEN, 150; HILGEN­ FELD, 130-140; KEIM (SINCE 1875), 130. Instead of the fifty years, which we claim to explain the facts we have just mentioned, we are allowed only from twenty to thirty. Let us see whether this concession will suffice to account for the facts which we have yet to mention. For the examination of this new date the guiding' documents at our disposal are Justin Martyr, Montanism, and the two great Gnostic systems of Valentinus and Marcion. Justin, born in Samaria, had traversed the East, then he came to Rome to found a school of Christian instruction, about 140. There remain to us three works of his generally acknowledged : the great and the small .Apology, which, since the time of Volkmar's works, are usually regarded as dating, the former from the year 147, the latter, which is a supple­ ment of the former, from one of the subsequent years; they are addressed to the Emperor and the senate. The third writing is the Dialogue with the Jew Trypho; it is the account of a public discussion held at Ephesus. It is a little posterior to the .Apologies. Justin perished in 16 6. In these three writings the author quotes seventeen times, as the source of the facts of the history of Jesus stated by him, writings entitled: Memoirs of the .Apostles (a:rrop,V'TJp,ove-6- µaTa -rwv a71'0

1 Apol. i. 33, 66, 67 ; Dial. 88, 100, 101, 102, 103 (twice), 104, 105 (thrco times), 106 (three times). -CHAP. I.] THE TL'l!E. 195

-church, along with the books of the prophets; 1 and it is .quite evident that this description does not apply only, in the writer's intention, to the worship celebrated by the Church of Rome, but to that of Christendom in general ; this appears from the expressions used by him : " All who live in the towns and in the country meet together in one place." Justin had visited Asia Minor and Egypt ; he knew therefore how the worship was celebrated as well in the East as in the West. Besides, he defended not only the Christians of Rome, but the -0hurch in general. Consequently what he says in this passage of the celebration of public worship, and in many .others of that of baptism (A.pal. i. 61) and of the Holy Supper (A.pal. i 66), must be applied to all Christendom of that period. What, then, were those apostolical Memoirs, venerated by ,the churches of the second century to the extent of being publicly read in their worship equally with the book which, .according to the example of Jesus and the apostles, the church ,regarded as the divine Word, the Old Testament ? Justin .does not state the particular titles of those writings, it is our task to determine them. 1. First of all, let us state a probability which rises almost to a certainty. We have seen above that Irenreus, who wrote about thirty years after Justin (180-185), spoke, in Gaul, of -0ur four canonical Gospels as the only ones received in the -church. This usage was already so fixed in his time that he calls our gospel collection the q_uadriform Gospel (TE'rpaµopcpov -€ilaryrye/\.wv), and that he compares these four writings to the four cherubim of the Old Testament and the four quarters of the horizon. They form in his view an indivisible unity. .A.t the same time nearly, Clement, in Egypt, as we have seen, likewise oalls our Gospels "the four which alone have been transmitted to us" (p. 18 7). Theophilus, in Syria, at the same period, composes a Harmony of the four narratives (p. 188). Finally, a little earlier still (about 16 0), the Fragment of Muratori, enumerating the Gospels which are -used in public reading, speaks thus: " Thirdly, the Book of

1 '' On the day called that of the Sun, all those who dwell in the towns and ·in the country meet together, and read as much as time permits of the memoirs ..of the apostles and the writings of the prophets ; thereafter" ••• 196 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK Ill. the Gospel according to Luke . . . ; fourthly, the Gospel or John" . . . Then, without saying more of writings of this kind, he passes to the Acts and the Epistles. Is it conceiv­ able that the apostolical Memoirs, which Justin tells us were generally read in Christian worship twenty to thirty years, before, were dijfm·ent writings from those which these Fathers and the churches themselves thus distinguished from all other· writings of the same kind, or that at least these formed no part of the collection to which the martyr already ascribed a place in worship side by side with the prophetical writings of the Old Testament 1 To make such a thing possible, there must have been wrought during this short space of time a revolution in Christian worship, a substitution of sacred writings for sacred writings of which history offers not the- 5lightest trace, and which is rendered absolutely impossible by the universality and publicity of the use of the Memoirs of which Justin speaks, and the stability of apostolic usages at that period. Fathers, like Irenreus, were on the watch, and would not have allowed a change of those documents, from which the Church drew her knowledge of the life of Jesus, to be carried out without remarking it. 2. A special fact establishes a still more direct link between Justin on the one hand, and the Fathers of a some­ wl1at later date (Irenreus, etc.) on the other. Justin had a. disciple named Tatian, who before Theophilus had already composed a work similar to his. Eusebius tells us (H. E. iv. 19) that this book was entitled JJiatessaron-that is to say, composed by means of the jour.1 Now, according to the report of the Syrian bishop Bar-Salibi (twelfth century), who knew this work, for he quotes it in his commentary on the Gospels, this book began with these words of John's prologue (i. 1) : " In the beginning was the Word." According to the same author, the well-known deacon of Edessa, Ephrem (who. died in 373), had composed a commentary on this same work. of Tatian of which an Armenian translation has recently been discovered and published (Venice 18 7 6). This translation confirms all the Fathers have said regarding the Harmony of Tatian. In a book of an apocryphal character, the Doct1·inr: of .Addmns (of the middle of the third century), where the- 1 See aJso Epiphanius, Hrer. xlvi. 1, and TL.eodoret. Heer. Fab. i 20, CHAP. I.] THE TIME. Hl7 history of the establishment of Christianity at Edessa is related, it is said: " The people assemble for the service of prayer and for [the reading of] the Old Testament and [for that of the J New in the Diatessaron." 1 This writing of Tatian was therefore widely spread in the East, for it was read there even in public worship in room and place of the four Gospels. This is confirmed by the report of the Bishop of Cyrus, in Cilicia, Theodoret (about 420). He -relates " that he had found two hundred copies of Tatian's book in the churches of his diocese, and that he had substi­ tuted for that, on some points, heterodox harmony, the Gospels -0/ the f oitr evangelists ('7"a TWV 'T€'T'1"apwv EUO/'j"f€A,t(T'7"0JI avretU'1"fa"lov eua"f"fEXia)," thus our four separate Gospels, those which Tatian had combined in one. If we remember the relation in which Tatian stood to Justin, the identity of the apostolical Memoirs of the master with the four combined in one by the disciple will not admit of doubt. Besides, in his Discourse to the Greeks, Tatian himself quotes Matthew, Luke, and John ; of the last, i. 3 : " .All things were made by Hirn (the Logos);" iv. 24: "God is a Spirit;" finally, i. 5 with this formula indicating a sacred authority: "This is what is said (TovTo fU'n TO elp'T}µ.evov) : The darkness com­ prehended not the light ; . . . now the light of God is the Word." 3. But why, if it is so, does Justin designate these books by the unusual name of Memoirs, instead of simply calling them Gospels ? Because he is addressing, not Christians, but the Emperor and the senate, who would not have understood the Christian name Gospels, a designation unexampled in profane literature. Every one, on the contrary, knew the a7roµv'T}µovd,µam (Memoirs) of Xenophon. To this customary .designation Justin has recourse, exactly as he substitutes for the Christian terms baptism and Sabbath those of batli and .Sunday. Finally, Justin himself, in one of the passages in which he quotes the Memoirs (A.pol. i 4. 6 6), expressly

1 In the catena of Victor of Capua (545), the work of Tatian is called Diapente, "composed by means of the five." But immediately before the same ,author has described it as nuum ex quatuor. There is therefore here an over• eight of the author, or perhaps an allusion to the quotations of Justin foreign to our four GosJJels, which seemed to him to imply the use of a fifth source. 198 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III!. adds : " which are composed by the apostles and called Gospels ea KaAe'imt eva,yryl).ia);" and in another passage (JJial. 103} he thus expresses himself: " The Memoirs which I say were: composed by the apostles and by those who accompanied them," which, whatever some critics may say, can only apply to our four Gospels, two of which were composed by apostles and two by apostolic helpers. All the subtleties of critics will not change the -evidence in the least. 4. But, finally, let us consult the quotations taken by Justin from the Memoirs themselves. Nobody any longer denies the use of the three Synoptics by this Father. In 1848, Zeller admitted the use of Luke; in 1850, Hilgenfeld that of Matthew ; then in 18 5 4, that of Mark ; Credner in 1860, Volkmar in 1866, and Scholten in 1867, acknow­ ledged that of the three. There remains the Gospel of John. Keim already wrote in 18 6 7 (vol. i. p. 13 8) : " It is easy to show that the Martyr had before his eyes a whole series of Johannine passages;" and Hilgenfeld, in his Introduction, in 18 7 5 (p. 7 34) says: "We find the first trace of John's Gospel in Justin Martyr." Mangold thus sums up, in this very year, the result of all the discussions which have recently taken place on this point : " That Justin knew and used the fourth Gospel is certain, and it is also undoubted that he makes use of it as a writing proceeding from the Apostle John." 1 And, in fact, John's doctrine of the Logos appears in all Justin's writings; it is their fundamental characteristic. Let us quote a single example from each of his writings: "His Son, the only one who may be properly called Son, the Logos who was begotten with Him before created things, when He created all things by Him ... is called Christ" (A.pol. ii. 6). "The first power, after God, the Father and the Master of all, is the Son, the Word, who, having been made flesh in a certain way, became man (&., ·rlva Tpowov aap«o'Tt'Ot7J0els tl,v0pw'Tt'o<, ,yi7ovev)" (Apol. i. 32). IJial. c. 10 5 : " Because He was the only Son of the Father of all things (µ,ovo7ev1J'> on ,jv T,P 'Tt'aTpt Truv o"}..wv )." The relation between Justin and John on this fundamental point is so evident that Volkmar has been forced in the end to admit it; but he gets out of it by an expedient which is not a bad 1 Grett. gelehrte Anzeigen, 5 und 12 Jan. 1881 CHAP. I.] THE TIME. 199 imitation of a clown's trick. According to him, it was not Justin who copied John; it was pseudo-John who, writing about 155, copied Justin, whose writings were in circulation from 147-150. Justin gave the first outlines of the theory of the Logos ; the false John developed and perfected it. "But," says Keim in answer to this supposition, "who can seriously think of making the gifted and original author of the fourth Gospel the disciple of a mind so mediocre, depen­ dent, given to compilation, poor in style, as the Martyr 1 " We shall say : The theology of the former is the simple expression of his religious consciousness of the immediate impression produced by the person of Jesus; while, as ,v eizsacker has shown,1 the characteristic feature of Justin is to serve as a connecting link between Christian thought,. and speculations current outside of Christianity in his day. Justin informs us that the Logos proceeds from the Father, as one fire is kindled by another, without the latter being thereby diminished; he explains to us that He differs from the Father in number but not in thought, etc. etc. How dare it be affirmed that Justin surpasses John in simplicity 1 The truth is, that John is the witness and Justin the theologian. John's prologue-there only is there any question of the Logos in our Gospel-is the primordial revelation in its simple and apostolical form; J ustin's writings represent the first effort to appropriate this revelation rationally. Moreover, let us hear Justin himself, Dial. I O5 : " I have previously shown that He was the only Son of the Father of all things, His Logos and His power, born of Him and after­ wards made man by means of the Virgin, as we have learned from the Memoirs." Justin himself here tells us from what source he drew his doctrine of the Logos ; it was from his apostolical Memoirs. Hilgenfeld has alleged that Justin appealed to the Memoirs only for the second of the two facts mentioned in this passage : the miraculous birth ; but the two facts mentioned depend equally through one and the same conjunction (8n, that) on the verbal ideas : I have shown, and as we have learned. Besides, the principal notion, according to the whole context, is that of the only Son (µ,ovoryev~-.) which belongs to the former of the two dependent 1 Jahrb. fur deutsche Theol. 1867. 200 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IIL propositions.1 Our conclusion is expressly confirmed by what Justin says (Dial. 48): he speaks of certain Christians who were not agreed with him on this point, and he declares that if he does not think like them, it is not merely because they form only a minority in the church, but because it is not by human teachings that we have been led to believe [thus] in Christ, but by the teachings of the holy prophets and those of Christ Himself (" Toi,; Ota TWV 'IT'pO'P"]TWV ICYJpvx0eia-i Kai, ot' ainou oioax0eiut "). Now, where else than in the Gospel of John can we find the teachings of Christ regarding His pre-existence ? Comp. also Apol. i. 46 : "That Christ is God's first-begotten, being the Logos of whom the whole human race is made partaker, this is what has been taught ns (Eoioax­ e,,,µ,ev)" It is evident from the us, which applies to Christians in general, and from the term taught, that Justin was in no wise the author of the doctrine of the incarnation of the Logos, but that in calling Jesus by this name he felt himself carried by the great current of doctrine given in the church, and the source of which must necessarily be found in the writings, or at least in one of the apostolical writings of which he made use. 5. The use of our Gospel by J u,;tin appears, finally, from several particular quotations. Dial. 88 : "A.nd as men thought that he (John the Baptist) was the Christ, he himself cried : ' I am not the Christ, but the voice of him that crieth (OVIC , eiµi ' ' O• X ptCTTO<;,' a11,11,a,._ "\ \ 't'(J)V'I}A.. I ,-,OOOVTO<;Q ~ ) • ' " Comp. J 0 h n i. 20 and 23. Hilgenfeld admits this quotation.-Dial. 69, Justin says that Jesus healed the blind from their birth (Toti<; EK "fEven}c;); the Gospel of John alone (ix. 1) ascribes to Him a cure of this kind ; the same expression etc "fEVETTJ<; is used by J ohn.-Another interesting passage occurs, Dial. 8 8 : "The apostles wrote that when Jesus went up from the water, the Holy Spirit shone above Him like a dove." It is the only case in which Justin uses the expression: the apostles wrote. It evidently applies to the two Gospels of Matthew and John.-In Dial. 2 9, Just.in demonstrates that Christians

1 This has been clearly brought out by Mr. Drummond, Theological Review (vol. xiv. pp. 178-182; comp. Ezra .Abbot, p. 43), who refers to the fact that this whole explanation is occasioned by the term .-.•••r .. .,, in Ps. xxii. which Justin is here explaiuing. -CHAP. I.] THE TIME. 201

.are no longer subject to the Jewish Sabbath, and he does so by appealing to the fact that God governs the world on that ,day as well as on others. In c. 2 7 he also remark$ the fact that children are circumcised on the eighth day, though it should fall on a Sabbath day (,c&v ij ~µ,epa, TWV a-a{3{3am,w) .. Here it is easy to see the connection with John v. 1 7 and vii. 22, 23.-Apol. i. 52, Justin quotes the saying of Zech. xii. 10: "They will look on Him whom they have pierced {,cai -ro'TE GtovTai El<; 8v egE/CEV'T1JUav)." In this form it differs both from the words of the Hebrew text (" they will look on me whom" ...) and from that of the LXX.: ,cat J1rt/3?1itovrnt wpo<; µ,e av0' Gospel of Matthew, which, according to a host of testimonies, was by far the most read in the earliest times of the Church, and in which this term is habitually employed. Abbot demonstrates that this same change occurs in the quotation of the passage­ by the Greek and Latin Fathers, all of whom had John in, their hands. But a graver objection is made, that this same saying of Jesus is found as a quotation in the Clementine Homilies (ix. 26), exactly with the same changes as in Justin, which seems to prove that the two authors took it from a. common source other than John, for example, the Gospel to­ the Hebrews. Here is the passage from the Olementines, the reader will judge for himself: "This is what the true prophet declared unto us with an oath: Verily I say unto you, Unless ye are born again of living water (edv µ,~ avaryevvr;0i']Te iJoan twvn), in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." It is clear that, as Abbot says, the difference between Justin and the Olementines is much greater than that between these two writings and John. This is because the text of the Clementine& is influenced, not only like that of Justin, by Matt. xviii. 3,, but especially by Matt. xxviii. 19 (the formula of baptism).1

1 The author of the Recognitions quotes thus: ".Amen dico vobis, nisi qu'4, denito renatus fuerit ex aqua, non introibit in regna ccelorum." He quotes~ comhitiinir v"rses 3 and 5 of John, he only rejects the expression : and of t/u;; CHAP. I.] THE TIME. 203

Let us finally refer to a quotation from the First Epistle of John, which occurs in Justin. In Dial. eh. 123, he says: " All at once we are called to become sons of God ; and we are so," which goes back to 1 John iii. 1 (according to the reading now adopted by many critics): "Behold what love God has had for us, that we should be called sons of God ; and we are so." Hilgenfeld admits this quotation. How is it conceivable that in the face of all these facts Reuss can thus express himself (p. 94): "We conclude that Justin did not embrace the fourth Gospel among those which he generally quotes under the name of Memoirs of the apostles." What argument, then, is powerful enough to neutralize in his view the force of the numerous quotations which we have just produced? "Justin," says he, "has not had recourse, as one would have expected, to our Gospel when he wished to establish the historical facts which he was concerned to make good." But is it not well known that there is nothing more misleading in criticism than arguments taken from what a writer should have said or done, and did not do or say '! Abbot quotes curious examples taken from contemporary history. We have already referred to the fact that the Gospel of Matthew was the most generally used source in the first days of the church. This is also the case with Justin, who uses Luke much less frequently than Matthew, and Mark much less still than Luke. John is more used than Mark.1 As to us, we think we have proved: 1. That the fourth Gospel existed at the time of Justin and formed part of his apostolical Memoirs ; 2. That it was publicly read in the churches of East and West as one of the authentic documents of the history and doctrine of Jesus; 3. That it consequently

Spirit, in order the more to glorify baptism with water in conformity with the ritual tendency of the time. 1 The other general objections raised by A. Thoma, in Hilgenfeld's Zeitschrift (1876), and by the work, Supernatural Religion, are refuted by Abbot, pp. 61- 76. They do not concern us here, for Thoma himself admits that Justin knew and used almost in every chapter " the Gospel of the Logos ; " he alleges only that he did not rec,ognise it as apostolical and truly historical. This matters little to us, for here we are only concerned with the question whether the Gospel existed in the time of Justin and was used by him.-As to the question whether the few facts of the evangelic history quoted by Justin, which are not found in our Gospels, are borrowed from oral tradition or from some lost writing, the Gospel of the Hehrews, for example, we have no reason to occupy ourselves with it here. 204 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III.

possessed, even at that period, conjointly with the other three, a very ancient notoriety and general authority, equal to that of the Old Testament. Now it is impossible that a writing which occupied such a place in the church in 140, should have been composed only about the year 130.1 In the same year, 140, when Justin came to settle at Rome, there arrived also one of the most illustrious represen­ tatives of the Gnostic doctrines, Valentinus. After having had a school in the capital for some time, he went to close his career in Cyprus about 160. We already know some of his principal disciples, Ptolemy, Heracleon, Theodotus, and we know how much in favour the fourth Gospel was in their schools ; history confirms the saying of Irenreus in regard to them: "Availing themselves in the most complete manner of the Gospel of John." It is therefore very probable that their master had set them the example on this point. Tertullian contrasts Valentinus with another Gnostic, Marcion, observing that the former accepted the sacred collection in its entirety, not composing Scriptures according to his doctrine, but rather adapting his doctrine to the Scriptures/.! His system is well known ; he represented as emanating successively from the eternal and divine abyss pairs of reons (principles of things), the first four of which formed what he called the ogdoad (the sacred eight). The names of those reons were : Logos, Light, Truth~ Grace, Life, Only Son, Paraclete. Here it is easy to recognise the influence of John's prologue, for all these names are found together in this passage, with the exception of the last, which does not appear till later in the Gospel, and which is used in the Epistle. It has been asked, it is true, whether it might not be the evangelist who composed his prologue under the influence of the Valentinian Gnosis, and Hilgenfeld thought that his aim was to insinuate this new doctrine in a mitigated form into the Church. We have already seen to

1 The Letter to Diognetus, on which the fourth Gospel has left a profound impression, is sometimes ascribed to Justin. In our view, as in that of Renss, this letter must date from about the year 130. But, independently of those who, like Overbeck, bring it down to the fourth century, others place it under Marcus .Aurelius only, in the second half of the century. Comp. Dneseke, Jahrb. fur protest. Theol., 2d nnm. 1881. In these circumstances we abstain from adducing the passages or expressions borrowed from John. ~ De Prrescr. Hreret. c. 38. CHAP. r.] THE TIME. 205 what forced interpretations (of John viii. 44, for example, and other passages) this critic has been led by his point of view. Let us add that the terms by which Valentinus designates his reons, receive in his system an artificial, stilted, mythological sense, while in the prologue of John they are taken in their simple, natural, and, moreover, biblical sense; for they all belong to the language of the Old Testament. It was not certainly John who transformed the divine actors of the Gnostic drama into simple religious notions ; it was very evidently the opposite which took place : " Everything leads us to hold," says Bleek, " that the Gnostics made use of those expressions, which they met with in a valued work, as points of support, intended to sustain their speculative system." " John," says Keim to the same effect, " knows nothing of those reons, of that pleroma, of those masculine and feminine pairs, and of that entire long machinery provided to convey God into the finite ; therefore it is undoubtedly he who is the oldest, and who, as Irenreus points out, laid the foundation of the edifice." Hilgenfeld alleges that John's Logos is merely a concentration of the series of V alentinus' reons. Hase replies that one may maintain, with at least equal right, that it is the one Logos of John which was divided by the Gnostics into their series of reons. In the Philosophumena (vi. 35), Hippolytus relates of Valentinus as follows: "He says (cp1JJi) all the prophets and the law spoke according to the Demiurge, the senseless God, and it is on this account that the Saviour says: 'All those who came before me are thieves and robbers.'" It is an express quotation from John x. 8. Criticism answers : Perhaps it was not Valentinus himself who spoke thus, but one of his successors. Let us admit this, notwithstanding the very positive: He says of Hippolytus. The ogdoad, with its Johannine names forming the basis of the whole Valentinian system, nevertheless remains ; and it would be very strange if it was not the head of the school who laid the foundation of the system. We do not think, therefore, that an impartial criticism can deny that Valentinus himself used the fourth Gospel1

1 The following are the words of Heinrici in his well-known work, Die Valen­ tinianische Gnosis und die heilige Schrift; " The Valentinians thus used Scripture as a universally recognised authority ; it consequently possessed that authorjty 206 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK TII,

Two years before Valentinus, in 138, Marcion arrived at Rome; he came from Pontus, where his father was bishop, and where he had been brought up in the Christian faith. Tertullian makes allusion to his Christian past, apostrophizing him thus (De carne Christi, c. ii.): "Thou who, when thou wast a Christian, didst fall, rejecting what thou hadst previously believed, as thou confessest in a certain letter." To what did this rejection (rescindendo) refer, with which Tertullian up­ braids him, and which had accompanied his spiritual fall ? The answer is given us by two other passages of the same Father. In the work specially intended to refute Marcion's doctrines, Tertullian relates (.Adv. Marc. iv. 3) that Marcion, " in studying the Epistle to the Galatians, found that Paul rebuked the apostles for not walking in the truth, and that he took advantage of this rebuke to destroy the confidence which was put in the Gospels published under the name of the apostles and of apostolic men, and to demand faith for his own Gospel, which he substituted for those." We know, in fact, that Marcion had chosen by preference the Gospel of Luke, and that after mutilating it, to adapt it to his system, he gave it to his churches as the rule of their faith. Now, what is proved by the inference which he drew from Galatians ii. 1 The apostles mentioned in this chapter are Peter and John. If Marcion concluded from this passage to the rejection of their Gospels, he must have had in his hands a Gospel of Pete1 -was it Mark ?-and a Gospel of John. He rejected from that time those books of the Canon which had been transmitted to him by his father, the Bishop of Sinope. In the De carne Christi, c. iii., we read a second sentence which leads to the same result as the foregoing : " If thou hadst not 1·1'fiected the writings opposed to thy system, the Gospel of John would be there to convince thee." That Marcion might reject this book, it must have been in existence, and Marcion must have possessed it previously. And let us observe that he rejected it, not because it was not apostolical, but, on the contrary, because it was so. For in his view the twelve apostles, previous to the appearance of the system ..•. The use which the Valentinians made of the Gospel of John, and of the Epistles to the Colossians and to the Ephesians, proves that these books were acknowledged and 11.lready useri as apostolic writings in the first half of the sooond century." aCHAP. I.] THE TIME. 207 imbued with Jewish prejudices, had not understood Jesus ; so their Gospels (Matthew, Mark, John) must be set aside. Paul alone had understood the Master, and the Gospel of Luke, his -0ompanion, must alone be an authority.-Volkmar has made the author of the fourth Gospel an adherent of Marcion, who sought to introduce his doctrines into the Church. But what is there in common between Marcion's violent hatred to the .Jewish law and the God of the Jews, and a Gospel in which the Logos, coming to Israel, comes to His own, and entering the temple of Jerusalem, declares that He is in His Father's house ? .And how can it be reasonably maintained that a writer whose thought strikes its roots in the soil of the Old 'Testament, is the disciple of a master who rejected from the New all that implied the divinity of the Old? In saying this, we have answered the question of the same author when he asks why, if John existed before Marcion, the latter did not choose him rather than Luke, to make of it the Gospel of his sect. The ancient heretic was more clear-sighted than the modern critic; he understood that, in order to use John, he must mutilate in some way, from one end to the other, and he preferred to cut it off at a stroke, rescindendo, as Tertullian says. At the same period when Justin, Valentinus, Marcion met .at Rome, a fanatical sect arose in Asia Minor, Montanism. Its founder wished to produce a reaction against the looseness of ·Christendom and the mechanical character of the official clergy. Montanus announced the near coming of Christ, and affected to bring down on the church the Spirit promised for the last ,days, and whom he called the Paraclete, evidently after the promise of Jesus, John xiv. 16, 2 6, etc. He even identified himself with this Spirit, if it is true, as Theodoret affirms, that Montanus called himself Paraclete, Logos, Bridegroom. But it is not these expressions only, borrowed from John, it is this whole spiritualistic movement, it is this energetic reaction .against a more and more prevailing ritualism, which supposes the existence in the Church of a writing forming an authority, and capable of serving as a point of support to so energetic a movement. Thus then, in 140, Justin, the martyr belonging to the orthodox church, V alentinus, the Egyptian Gnostic, Marcion 208 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTll GOSPEL. [BOOK In.. from Pontus, Montanus in Phrygia, know, and, excepting: Marcion, use with one accord John's Gospel to found on it their doctrine and their churches ; would all this be possible if the work had only existed for a decade of years ? The date- 130-140 falls before these facts, as that of 160-170 vanished­ before those facts which were previously alleged. Let us come to the third position attempted in our day by criticism.

110-12 5.-REUSS, NICOLAS, REN AN, SABATIER, WEIZSACKER, HASE. History here furnishes us with four guiding points : the· Gnostic Basilides and the three apostolical Fathers, Papias, Polycarp, and Ignatius. Last of all, we shall interrogate the appendix to our Gospel, eh. xxi., which, though joined to the book, does not properly form part of it. Basilides flourished at Alexandria about 12 0-12 5 ; he died· shortly after 132. Before teaching in Egypt, he is said to have laboured in Persia and Syria. In the work Archelai et Manetis disputatio, it is said : "A certain Basilides, more anciently still, was a preacher among the Persians, shortly after the time of the apostles." According to Epiphanius (Hror. xxiii. 1-7, xxiv. 1 ), he had also laboured at Antioch. His activity consequently goes back to the first years of the second century. He himself pretended to teach only what had been taught him by the Apostle Matthias from the secret instructions which he had received from the Lord. That this assertion might have a shadow of probability, it must have been possible for him to meet with Matthias somewhere; which makes us go back for the period of his birth to a some­ what early time in the first century.1 In a homily on Luke, ascribed to Origen, it is said that " Basilides already took the liberty of writing a Gospel accord­ ing to Basilides." 2 The word already proves that Basilides was regarded as belonging to the first times of Gnosticism. As to, the phrase : a Gospel according to Basilides, it is very doubtful whether we should understand thereby a gospel narrativ& intended to form a rival to our Gospels. By this term,. : See Hofstede de Groot, BasilidP;; und seine Zeit. 2 Ambrose and Jerome have repeatod this fact. CHAP. I.] THE TIME. 209 indeed, Basilides himself understood, not a simple narrative, but "the knowledge of supersensible things (i/ Twv u,reprwu­ µirov ryvro

1 " There has come down even to us a work by .Agrippa Castor," etc. : 'E,

Philosoplw,mena, and perhaps the Gospel of John itself. Need we point out to this critic that he falls here into a vicious circle ? For he grounds his argument precisely oo what is in question. If Weizsacker reasons thus: Thr Basilides of Hippolytus quotes the letters to the Ephesians .and Colossians ; therefore he is a pseudo-Basilides, for those letters were not yet rn existence at the time of the true Basilides,-are we not entitled, we who believe in the authen­ ticity of those Epistles, to reason in an opposite way and say : Basilides quotes those writings ; therefore in his time they were in existence and were acknowledge

it is exactly he who follows Andrew and Peter immediately in the Johannine narrative (i. 43 ff.). Besides, Andrew and Philip are the two most frequently named apostles in the later part of our Gospel (vi. 5-9, xii. 20-22). Then comes Thomas. Nathanael is here omitted (John i. 46 ff.), we know not why; he is embraced in the sort of et cmtera in which this incomplete list terminates: "or any other of the Lord's disciples." As to Thomas, it is he of all the other disciples who with the preceding plays the most prominent part in the fourth Gospel (xi. 16, xiv. 5, xx. 24 ff.). After­ wards come James and John. Why so late, they who are always named immediately after and with Peter in the Synoptics? A.gain, it is in the fourth Gospel that the €xplanation of this phenomenon must be sought. The two sons of Zebedee are not once named throughout the whole narrative; they are expressly designated only in the appendix, xxi. 2, where their names occur, as here, at the end of the list of the apostles mentioned in that passage. Of all the · -0ther apostles, Matthew alone is named hy Papias; and it has been supposed, undoubtedly with reason, that it is the mention -0f the fourth evangelist which has led here to that of the first. It may also be presumed that the three names, James, John, and Matthew~ occupy this secondary place because the passage was dealing with the apostles as having furnished to Papias the oral traditions which he used. Now James died too early to have been able to give much information, and John and Matthew had consigned the greater part of theirs to their writings.-Finally, Papias names two personages yet alive, Aristion and the Presbyter John, whom he calls "the Lord's -disciples." It is exactly in the same way that the J ohannine enumeration closes, xxi. 2 : "And two other of His disciples " [not apostles]. If to these striking similarities we add the fact that none of those disciples named by Papias (except Peter, James, and John) play any part whatever in the synoptic narrative, we shall be forced to the conclusion that the view which this Father had of the Gospel history was formed on the narrative of the fourth Gospel still more than on that of the three others. Liidemann, in his articles on ihe fragment of Papias,1 does not dispute the similarity whict1 1 Jah1·b. fur proteJJt. Theol. 1879, 3d number. 214 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK Ill we have just established. "It is a fact," says he, "that the fragment of Papias is in connection with the J ohannine mode of speaking, both by the phrases ev-ro"A.at, commandments, and a"A.~0eta, truth (see the fragment, pp. 52, 53), and by its beginning of the list of apostolic names. . . . The abrupt appearance of Thomas, in Papias, leaves us also to think only of the fourth Gospel." But after this frank declaration there come the expedients which never fail: "There existed in the circle whence the Johannine writings proceeded in Asia a mode of speaking and thinking which, on the one hand, has left certain elements in the writings of Papias (between 12 0-140), and which, on the other, has found its full bloom in the writings of pseudo-John, composed nearly at the same time." This explanation would be admissible, at the utmost, if the matter in question were some fact of the Gospel history related simultaneously by the two authors, or, indeed, of the use of some common terms like commandment and truth. But it cannot account for an enumeration of proper names, such ~s those mentioned in the passage of Papias, and in which the whole of this Gospel history is reflected. Holtzmann has felt that there was something compromising in the admissions of his colleague ; he has sought to parry the blow in another way.1 He explains the order of the apostles in the fragment of Papias by the geographical situation of the countries in which they are judged to have propagated the gospel. This solution will remain the exclusive property of its author. Two other facts seem to us to attest the existence of the fourth Gospel prev:iously to the time of Papias. Eusebius attests that this Father quoted as proof, in his work, passages from the First Epistle of John as well as from the First Epistle of Peter. Now we have shown that this letter of John is by the same author as tI. fourth Gospel, and that it was composed after the latter. If, then, Papias knew and employed the Epistle, how should he not have known and employed the Gospel composed by the same author 1-In the Vatican library there has been found a Latin manuscript of the Gospels of the ninth century, in which that of John is preceded by a preface, wherein it is said: "John's Gospel was

1 "Papias und Johannes," in the Zeitschr. fur Wi8senschaftl. 1'/ieol. 1880. 1st number. CHAP. I,] THE TIME. 215

published and sent to the churches by John during his life­ time, as Papias of Hierapolis, the beloved disciple of John, has related in his five exoteric, that is to say, last books." These last words evidently proceed from an incorrect copy, like so large a number of sentences in Muratori's Fragment. Instead of exoteric we must in any i;ase read exegetic; comp. the title of the book of l)apias: "Expositions (Jm~uet,;) of the Words of the Lord." Moreover, this statement is followed by some legendary details,1 which, however, are not attributed to Papias himself: Notwithstanding all this, the fact that Papias spoke in his five books of the Gospel of John is attested by this passage.2 Iremeus sometimes quotes the presbyters who lived with .T ohn in .Asia Minor down to the time of Trajan. They were i;herefore the contemporaries of Papias and Polycarp. Here is an exposition which he ascribes to them (v. 36): "As the presbyters say, They who shall be judged worthy of dwelling in heaven shall find their place there, while the rest shall inhabit the city [the earthly Jerusalem]; and therefore it is that the Lord said,3 In my Father's house are many mansions." If it is the saying of Jesus, reported John xiv. 2, which the presbyters thus interpreted, as seems evident, then John's Gospel was already in their hands. The same appears also from the passage of Irenreus (ii. 22), in which he ascribes to them the idea that Jesus had reached the age of 40 or 50, which can only be explained by a misconception arising from those words of the Jews in our Gospel (viii. 5 7) : " Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham ? " Polycarp wrote, according to Irenreus, a very large number of letters, of which only one remains to us, and that of only thirteen short chapters. The fourth Gospel is not quoted in it; but we can prove, on the other hand, the truth of what Eusebius reports, when he declares that Polycarp, as well as Papias, borrowed proofs from the First Epistle of Peter and the First of John; this is what induced him to place those 1 Like the following, for example : that it was Papias who wrote the Gospel to John's dictation. 2 Comp. Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst? pp. llS and 119. 8 Literally : "And therefore the Lord to have said (.:p.,.;,.,,)." The infinitiv& serves to show that here we have the saying of the presbyters themselves. 216 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IIL writings among the lwrnologoitmena. Indeed, in Polycarp's letter to the Philippians (eh. 7) we read these words: "Who­ ever does not confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is an antichrist." This is the principle laid down by John, first Epistle, iv. 3: "Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God : and this is that spirit of antichrist." The coincidence of these two sentences cannot be accidental. The expedient imagined by Baur and Zeller, who would have us see here only a maxim which was in circulation in the church at that period, and that of Volkmar, who alleges that it is John who copies Polycarp, and not the reverse, are without probability. Ten lines of John read side by side with ten lines of Polycarp show on which side are the originality and priority. It must there­ fore be concluded that if the letter of Polycarp is authentic, as Zahn 1 has so learnedly demonstrated, and if it dates, as appears from its contents, from the time immediately following the martyrdom of Ignatius (in 110), the First Epistle of John, and consequently the Gospel, were already in existence at that period. But, it is asked, how in that case does it come about that Papias and Polycarp did not use such a work more copiously ? Above all, the contrast is noted between the silence of Eusebius as to any quotation whatever of our Gospel by these two Fathers, and the very express mention which he makes of the use of the first Epistle by both.-If Eusebius has expressly stated this latter fact, it is because the two Epistles of Peter and John formed part of the collection of catholic Epistles which, with the exception of these two, were all disputed writings. He was therefore concerned to point out their exceptional character as homologoumena in this collection, a character appearing from the use which had been made of them by two such men as Papias and Polycarp. It was quite otherwise with the Gospel, which belonged without dispute to the class of universally received books. The em­ ployment which might have been made of them by those two apostolical Fathers came under the general usage. Eusebius himself has explained his method (H. E. iii. 3. 3): "He wishes to point out," he says, "what ecclesiastical writers made use 1 In his Ignatius von Antiochien. ()HAP. I.] THE TIME. 217 of the disputed books, and of which of them ; then what things, or [some of the things which] 1 have been sairl about those writings of the New Testament which were universally received, and all that has been said (5a-a) concerning those which are not so." To point out certain interesting details regarding the homologoumena (as we know he has done in regard to Matthew and Mark), then to relate all he could collect regarding the antilegomena, such was the end he had in view. It was therefore precisely because with the whole church he ranked John in the first class that he did not think himself called expressly to point out the use which those :Fathers made of him. But, on the contrary, if he had found in such men a complete blank in regard to this writing, he could not have affirmed as he does the universal admission -of it. Nay, more; a word in the discussion of Eusebius, regarding the fragment of Papias which he has preserved to us, shows clearly that he had found in this Father numerous passages referring to the fourth Gospel On occasion of the name of John, in the enumeration of the apostles in Papias, he observes that this Father evidently means to designate thereby "the evangelist" (a-aipw~ 07JA.rov Tov eva,y,ye"J,.,unryr1). He might have said : the apostle, but he enters into the mind of Papias himself, and says: the evangelist, which proves that he found in his writing the constant proof of the fact that John was the author of a Gospel. A.s to Polycarp, nothing obliged him to quote, in the eight pages which remain to us, the Gospel of John. What preacher quotes in each of his sermons all the writings of the New Testament which he holds to be authentic 1 Everybody knows the interminable discussions raised by the letters of Ignatius, bishop of Antioch at the beginning of the second century. A.n almost unanimous tradition, confirmed by the testimony of authors who wrote at Antioch itself, such as Ohrysostom and Evagrius, bears that he perished at Rome, devoured by wild beasts in the circus, in virtue of a sentence passed by the Emperor Trajan.2 It was while repairing as a

1 The two translations are possible, according as we accent the Greek pronoun ~;,,. (what things) or ,.,.,,,;, (some of the things). 2 The chronicler John Malalas ( eighth century) places the martyrdom oflgnatills ait Antioch itself. 1!1 that case Ignatius could never have made the journey to 218 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IIT. condemned man to this capital (between 107 and 116) that he is said to 11:we written the seven letters which alone can· pretend to authenticity.1 These letters exist in a double form, the one longer, the other simpler and more concise. Zahn, in his work on Ignatius of Antioch, has clearly demonstrated that the former of these two texts is the result of a deliberate work of interpolation; he has even pointed with great probability to the author of this fraud.2 He has at the same time· demonstrated the authenticity of the seven letters, as they have been preserved in the briefer form. The historian Eusebius already knew only these seven, and in this text. It is true that three of the seven have recently been recovered in Syriac in a briefer form still ;3 and at first the learned world inclined to regard this text as the sole faithful reproduction of the works of Ignatius. Zahn appears to us to have combated this opinion triumphantly, and to have proved that this text. is only an extract made by some Syrian monk from an older translation into that language. Only one alternative remains: the authenticity of the seven letters, as they were known t

Rome to which these letters refer. But how, then, explain so general & tradi­ tion 1 Would the church of Antioch have so easily yielded up in favour of Rome the honour of seeing such a martyrdom take place within it 1 1 There exist eight others, which are decidedly fictitious. ' One of the least honourable representatives of the semi-Adan party, Acacius tlie successor of Eusebius at Cresarea. 3 They were published for the first time by Cureton (184{>). CHAP. I.] THE TlME. 219 already meet with men like James the brother of the Lord at Jerusalem then his cousin and successor Simeon, Anianus at Alexandri~, Evagrius at Antioch, Linus at Rome, who occupy a position absolutely similar to that which Ignatius ascribes to the bishop of his time. As to the supposed heresy in the letters, it had already all its premises in the first century, as may be seen in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (xi. 3, 4), in the Epistle to the Colossians, and in the Apocalypse, where a form of Gnosticism is already clearly pointed out (ii. 20, 24). The germs of heresy were plentifully sown in the East at the time of Ignatius. What in our view renders the hypothesis of the spuriousness of the letters inadmissible is, that it seems impossible to invent not only so original a style and so strange a mode of thought, but especially such a character. There is in these letters a man, and a man such as is not fabricated. The following are a few quotations from our Gospel con• tained in the seven letters the text of which can lay claim to authenticity. Romans (c. vii.): "The living water speaking within me says to me, Come to the Father. I take no pleasure either in corruptible food or in the joys of this life; I want the bread of God, which is in the flesh of Jesus Christ. I want for drink His blood, which is incorruptible love." The whole Gospel of John is, as it were, contained in this cry of the martyr; but comp. more particularly the sayings iv. 14, xiv. 6, vi. 27, 32, 51, 55, 56.-Philad. (c. vii.): "The Spirit does not deceive, He who comes from God; for He knows whence He comes, and whither He goes, and He con­ demns secret things" (John iii. 8 and 20).-In the same Epistle, c. ix.: "He who is the door of the Father (0-upa -rov 7raTp6r;;), by which Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the prophets, the apostles, the church, enter in " (John x. 7-9).-In the letter to the Ephesians (c. vii.) Jesus is called "God come in the flesh" (Jv uap,c'i, "lev6µ,evor;; €Je6r;;); and in that to the Magnesians (eh. viii.) He is called "His eternal word" (airrov A.u"fo<, Motor;;). The idea of spiritual communion (lvwG't'>), which forms the basis of these letters, as of that of Polycarp, rests on John xvii., as Riggenbach has remarked. Hilgenfeld, who places the composition of these letters in 16 6, makes no difficulty of recognising that our Gospel (pub­ lished, according to him, in 130) is really employed in the 220 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK ID. passages quoted from the letters to the Romans and to the Philadelphians ; he even affirms that " the whole theology of the letters of Ignatius rests on John's Gospel." We accept this declaration, and conclude that, however little of authentic matter there may be in the letters of this martyr, the exist­ ence and use of John's Gospel are attc$ted from the beginning of the second century.1 It remains to examine a last witness, the appendix placed at the end of the fourth Gospel, as eh. xxi., particularly ver. 24, the authenticity of which cannot be disputed.2 At the end of this narrative of one of the last appearances of the risen Jesus, there is restored the exact form of a saying which Jesus had addressed to Peter in regard to John, and which circulated in the church in an incorrect form. Jesus was made to say that John should not die. The author of the appendix, who is either John himself or one of those about him, and who had heard him relate this scene (see p. 81), relates that Jesus had not expressed Himself so, but had simply said: " If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee'?" At what time can we suppose this rectifi­ cation to have been judged necessary ? At the end of the second century, where Keim places the composition. of this passage ? But by that time, either the saying of Jesus was forgotten, or, if it was still repeated, the date was somewhat late to remove the scandal which it might cause. No, cer­ tainly; there was only one point of time when this rectifi­ cation was in place. It was when men saw the aged apostle becoming feeble, that they asked: Is he then going to die, notwithstanding the Lord's promise 1 Or when he had just died, and the scandal was really produced ? This piece there­ fore bears its date in itself. It belongs either to the days which preceded or to those which immediately followed John's death. The contrast between the present participle : "This is the disciple that testijieth ( o µapTvpwv) of these things," and the past participle: "and that wrote" (,cal rypa,Jra~), seems to me

1 We do not mention here either the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, because of their numerous interpolations, nor the Pastor of Hermas and the Epistle oj Barnabas, whose borrowhigs from our Gospel seem to us by no means evident. 2 It is well known that it is not so with ver. 25, which is wanting in the Smarticus. CHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 221 to decide in favour of the former alternative. The disciple whom Jesus loved was yet living and testifying when this passage was written. However that may be, as this eh. xxi. is necessarily posterior to the Gospel, it follows that this writing dates from the very time of John's life. We think we have thus demonstrated that the third place attempted by criticism, that of 110-125, is as irreconcilable with the facts as the other two, and that we are forced to take a new step backwards, and to assign the composition of the book to the last times of the first century. But we do not think it possible to go back to an earlier date. Some writers, for example Wittichen, Lange, have attempted so do so. The former dates our Gospel from 70-80 (seep. 28); the latter places it before the destruction of Jerusalem. So early a date is incompatible with the knowledge of our three synoptic Gospels, which the author not only possesses himself, but sup­ poses from one end to the other to be in the possession of his readers. The dissemination of those three writings, whether published a little before or a little after the destruction of Jerusalem, requires a considerable interval of time between their composition and that of our Gospel. The date of this latter must therefore probably be placed, according to the facts which we have just expounded, between 80 and 90.

CHAPTER IL

THE AUTHOR.

:Mangold expresses his judgment on the external testimonies relating to the fourth Gospel in the following terms : " The external attestation is scarcely less strong than that of the synoptic Gospels;" then he adds: "It would suffice to estab­ lish it, if internal reasons did not oppose to the admission of its authenticity reasons which, to me at least, remain hitherto insurmonntable."1 It is this second order of considerations which is now chiefly to occupy us. We are coming to the central and decisive question, for the solution of which all that goes before has served only to prepare the way. It has : Bleek-Mangold's Einl. p. 281. 222 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III. sometimes been alleged that our Gospel remains what it is, let the author be who he may. Those who maintain this thesis do not themselves seriously believe what they assert, otherwise they would not put forth so much zeal in combating the J ohannine origin of the work. .And when Keim thus expresses himself: " The beauty of the book, its power to edify, its saintliness . . . none of all this depends on a name," it will be allowed us to answer: You are deceiving others, or you are deceiving yourself; for you cannot conceal from yourself that the discourses put into the mouth of Jesus, and the conception of His person expounded in this book, have a wholly different value for the church, according as it is the beloved apostle of the Lord who is giving us an account of what he saw and heard, or a thinker of the second century who is composing it all after his own fancy. We have here four subjects to study : 1. The ecclesiastical testimonies, bearing more particularly on the author's person ; 2. The objections raised by modern criticism against the result of this tradition ; 3. The internal proof drawn from the study of the book itself; 4. The examination of the principal hypo­ theses which are set up in our day in opposition to the traditional opinion of the J ohannine origin.

§ 1. THE TRADITIONAL TESTIMONIES. Our starting-point is the time when the general conviction of the church is expressed by an assemblage of indisputable testimonies, in the last third of the second century. Here we find Clement of .Alexandria, who relate11. the origin of the fourth Gospel in the following manner : "John, the last, observing that bodily things (Td

Irenams thus closes his account of the composition of the Gospels : " Thereafter John, the disciple of the Lord, he who rested on His bosom, also published the Gospel, whilst he -dwelt at Ephesus in Asia" (.Adv. Hmr. iii. 1). We have already q1;1-oted the testimony of Theophilus: "All inspired men, of whom John says, In the beginning was the Word." Here is how the Fragment of Muratori relates the origin -0f our Gospel : " The author of the fourth of the Gospels is .John, on~ of the disciples.1 When his fellow-disciples and the bishops exhorted him [to write], he said to them : ' Fast with me these three days, and we shall relate to one another wl1at shall be revealed to each.' During that same night, it was revealed to Andrew, one of the apostles, that John should publish everything in his own name, all the rest checking (his narrative]. . . . What is there, then, surprising in this, that John has set forth in detail those things in his letters, saying, in reference to himself : What we have seen with our -eyes, what we have heard with our ears, and our hands have handled, write we unto you 1 Thus he declares himself suc­ -cessively eye-witness and ear-witness, and, moreover, redactor -of the wonderful things of God." Hilgenfeld affects to find in this narrative an allusion to doubts which then existed, he says, regarding the J ohannine origin of our Gospel. Hesse, in his excellent work on the Fragment of Muratori, has shown that this piece betrays no such intention. The phrase : " What is there astonishing 1 " applies not to the Gospel, but to the Epistle. Starting from this point, let us attempt to ascend the .stream of tradition to apostolic times, and to seek the oldest traces of that conviction which appears universally at the end of the second century. Between 140 and 15 0, it is expressed, .as it appears to us, indubitably. We have seen that Justin, according to the almost universal -confession of our day, places our Gospel in the number of those memoirs on the life of Jesus which he habitually used.

1 This term is not put in opposition to that of apostle, as Reuss thinks, It is the translation of the term t-<«d~

He calls these writings 11£emoirs of the Apostles, and declares that some were composed by apostles, the others by apostolic helpers. If, consequently, the fourth Gospel formed part of them, Justin could only attribute it to an apostle, and that apostle could be no other than ·John, for never was it attempted to ascribe the book to any other apostolical person­ age than to him. And as, according to Justin, the Memoirs of the apostles already formed a collection, which was conjoined with that of the prophets, ancl read along with the latter in the public worship of the Christians, it must have been at that period when the four identically expressed titles were placed over the Gospels: "according to Matthew . . . accord­ ing to John." This titling, the work of the church, accom­ panied their gathering into a canonical collection. The title: according to John, is therefore the expression of the general conviction of the churches regarding this book in the middle of the second century. And it was not merely the orthodox churches which at that early period thought so, but also the sects separate from the Catholic Church ; witness, on the one hand, Marcion, who rejected our Gospel, not because it was not by an apostle of Jesus, but, on the contrary, as a writing composed by one of them, that is to say, by John (seep. 206); witness also the most illustrious disciple of Valentinus, Ptolemams, who, in his letter to Flora, quoted our Gospel with the words: "The apostle declares" (p. 19 0). According to Iremeus, Ptolemmus even went the length of affirming, on the ground of the pro­ logue of the Gospel, that the true author of the Valentinian Ogdoad was John (p. 190). Going back still further, to a period of which only sparse monuments remain to us, we find constantly the same conviction. We have already seen that, in the view of Papias, John was not only an apostle, but an evangelist, and that it is this character belonging to him as author of a Gospel which most naturally explains the position he assigns to him in his famous list of apostles beside Matthew (see pp. 52 and 213). If we have no special testimony from Polycarp, there is a fact of much greater value than would have belonged to­ ,111y declaration whatever. Polycarp lived till the middle of CHAP. II,J THE AUTHOR. 225 the second century ; it was therefore during the time of his activity as bishop of Smyrna that our Gospel began to circu­ late, and that it spread throughout the whole church as a writing of J obn. If be had not believed in the J ohannine origin of the book, he would not have failed to give it the lie ; for the advantage which the Gnostics took of it rendered it very compromising for the church, of which Polycarp was the most venerable leader ; and the slightest denial on the part of such a man would have profoundly shaken the conviction of the church. But nothing of the kind happened. History shows not the least trace of hesitation either in Polycarp him­ self or within the church. None of the presbyters of whom Irenreus speaks, and " who lived with John in Asia even to the time of Trajan," uttered a doubt, so that our Gospel was received without dispute from one end of the world to the other as the work of John. This absence of protestation is a negative fact of very positive value. It must not be con­ founded with a simple literary silence which may be explained by accidental circumstances. But from the period, and from the very surroundings in which John lived, a positive testimony makes itself heard: "That disciple [he whom Jesus loved] is he who beareth witness of these things and wrote them; and we know thut his witness is true." Such are the words we read, J olm xxi. 24. Who are they who thus speak to us and attest the composition of the fourth Gospel by the disciple whom Jesus loved ? They know him personally, for, in consequence of the knowledge they have of him, they think themselves able to certify the truth of his testimony. They do so in his life­ time; for they say of him, "who beareth witness and who wrote" (p. 220). They live around him, then, and it was no doubt into their hands that he delivered his book; and before giving it to the public, they furnish it with this postscript, feeling that, on account of the differences which exist between this writing and its predecessors, it will have some difficulty in making its way. How is it possible to evade the force of such a testimony ? Reuss imagines that those who gave it were bona fide deceived, and that, living a considerable time after John's death, they confounded with him the anonymous writer, who had by means of his narra- GODIGT I. p JOHN 226 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IIL tives composed the Gospel. But we have already seen that this eh. xxi. can only have been written at a period very 11ear the death of John, when such an error was impossible. The use of the present : "he who beareth witness," confirms this observation. Only one supposition would be possible, That the pseudo-John, in the course of the second century, had him­ self appended this attestation. After having taken the mask of St. John, he tried to support his first fraud by adding a second. He imagined a circle of friends round the apostle, and himself composed in their name the postscript which we have just read. It has often been sought to excuse the com­ posers of apocryphal books by speaking of pious fraud. Bnt here we should evidently have something more ; we should have reached the limits of knavery. And he who imagined such a procedure would be the man to whom we must ascribe the qualities of moral purity, profound holiness, and intimate communion with God, which were necessary to compose such a Gospel l The psychological and moral sense protests. In the whole course of the second century there exists, so far as we know, only one contradiction of the Joh an nine origin of the fourth Gospel. A party, to which Epiphanius has given the name of .Alogi (&A.oryoi, those who deny the Logos), maintained that the author of this book was not the Apostle John, but the heretic Cerinthus, his adversary at Ephesus. Their rejection was not founded on any traditional testimony. "The grounds on which they rested," says Zeller himself, " were, as far as we know, derived from internal criticism" . . . What follows from the fact, the only one which the adversaries of the authenticity can allege 1 Two things : the former, that the Alogi were destitute of all support in tradition; the latter, that there did not exist the shadow of a doubt as to the fact that our Gospel was com­ posed at Ephesus in tlrn time of St. John, for Cerinthus, to whom they ascribed it, was the apostle's contemporary and rival. The only opponents are thus transformed into witnesses and defenders.

§ 2. THE OBJECTIONS. It is in contradiction of this result of a tradition which may be called unanimous, that many critics of the present CHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 227

Jay raise their voices, and we have now to examine their .arguments. Hase, in his History of Jesus, enumerates eight objections to the authenticity; after setting them aside successively, he raises a ninth himself, which he does not succeed in solving, .and which determines his vote in the negative. We shall follow him in his lucid exposition. Only of those nine objec­ tions, we shall detach some which he combines with the rest, .and which it seems to us preferable to treat separately. The first seven, as we shall see, have already found their solution implicitly in the foregoing pages.

I. The silence of the oldest Fathers, particularly of those of Asia Minor, regarding the fourth Gospel.-It seems to us that the two preceding chapters have resolved this objection. Hase justly observes that "nothing is more uncertain than the assertion : a writer must have spoken of a certain thing or a certain person." The synoptic Gospels had been for a long time in circulation ; for a generation they had formed the basis of the knowledge which the church possessed of the history of Jesus. The quite recent Gospel of John had not yet made way for itself, nor exercised its proper influence ; it needed time to take its place, ere one could appeal to its records as to those of the oldest Gospels. We do not find this till after the time of Justin.

II. John, Jiidaizer as he was, cannot be the author of so spiritual a Gospel as that which bears his name. This, it appears, is the strongest objection in the eyes of Schurer: "It is psychologically inconceivable that an apostle, who in mature years was yet discussing with Paul the permanent obligation of the law, afterwards wrote a Gospel the anti-Judaism of which surpasses even that of Paul."1-We think we have shown that this estimate of John's point of view according to Gal. ii. is ill founded. The apostles personally kept the law, but not at all with the idea of its permanent obligation for salvation; otherwise they must have imposed it on the Gentiles ; and instead of giving the right hand of fellowship to Paul and Barnabas, they would have broken with them 1 Studien und Kritiken, 1876, 4th number, p. 774. 228 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. (BOOK rn.. conclusively. The difference being a matter of practice, not. of principle, the destruction of Jerusalem must have issued in bringing it to an end by breaking the last remnant of solidarity between the apostles and their people. Hase rightly remarks that John's sojourn in Asia Minor, his labours in the field sown by Paul, and the immense influence which he notoriously exercised in that country of Greek culture, prove­ with what width, adaptation, and freedom of mind he accom­ modated himself to his new surroundings, and knew how to become a Greek to the Greeks.

III. The Christianity of the churches of Asia Minor had a legal character. Now, if John was the author of such teaching, he cannot have been the writer of our Gospel.-But on what ground does this affirmation of the J udaizing character of the­ churches of Asia Minor rest ? On their gross Ohiliasm, it is said. We have already seen that almost the whole church of the second, and of the greater part of the third century was attached to millenarianism ; it was not J udaizing for all that. The Paschal rite of those churches is further alleged, in which they betray their J udaizing sympathies. The churches of Asia celebrated the Holy Supper of the Paschal feast on the evening of the 14th Nisan, independently of the day of the week on which this monthly date fell, while the other churches, and Rome in particular, celebrated the holy Paschal feast on the Sunday morning which followed Good Friday. whatever might be the monthly date of that Sunday. What reasons had determined the rite which the churches of Asia had adopted ? Either they wished thus to celebrate the evening of the day on which, according to the fourth Gospel, Christ died in the afternoon (the 14th Nisan, the eve of the­ Passover); in that case, whatever Baur may say, the Asiatic rite rests on the narrative of the Passion given in the fourth Gospel, and thereby testifies to the authenticity of that book ; the rite is therefore entirely independent of Jewish legality. Or the churches of Asia celebrated the Supper on the evening of the 14th, because it was on that evening that the Jews celebrated the Paschal feast,-and this is the explanation which certain sayings of the Fathers render most probable~ Would that be a symptom of Jewish legality 1 But St. Paul CHAP. II.J THE AUTHOR. 229

himself saw a symbol of Christ in the Paschal lamb ~1 Cor. v. 7) ; he kept the Jewish feasts with great care, especially that of the Passover, as is proved by Acts xx. 6 : " After the -days of unleavened bread, we sailed away from Philippi;" and 1 Cor. v. 8, where, at the very time of the feast of Pass­ over (comp. xvi. 8), he represents the Christian life as a permanent feast of unleavened bread. It is therefore probable that Paul, and not John, had originally introduced this Paschal rite at Ephesus, and that John had merely continued it. We find here that same symbolism, in virtue of which Jesus, in the institution of the Holy Supper, had transformed the memorial of the deliverance from Egypt into a memorial of eternal redemption.

IV. The divergences from the Synoptics.-We have already treated this subject, and demonstrated in detail that they are all to the advantage of the fourth Gospel, and clearly prove its historical superiority, so that far from forming an argume11t .against the authenticity of this work, they are one of its most decisive proofs.

V. The elevated and, often for the multitude, ineompre- 1iensible matter of the discourses of Jesus. This subject has been treated at length ; there is no occasion to return to it.

VI. How could a Galilean fisherman have risen to a wisdom $0 profound as that which is conspicuous in many parts of our Gospel 1-But, we shall ask in turn, how are we to .calculate what intimate and prolonged contact with the Lord might have produced in an ardent and profound soul, such as John's must have been ? "If," says Hase admirably, "the highest human wisdom has gone forth from Christianity, must it not be granted that in the proximity of such a being as Jesus, .a young man of rich and profound soul might have developed, and, as it were, been set on fire 1 A mind so powerful as that of Jesus in any case was, does not only attach itself to a faithful and loyal heart, but also to a mind which aims and aspires high. Most certainly, if John, when he taught in Asia, bad possessed only the apostolic simplicity and culture of the Galilean fisherman, he would not have produced in that 2:30 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. LBOOK lit. country the durahle impression of admiration and veneration, which he left there."

VII. The author of the fourth Gospel proceeded from thB" Gnostic circles of the second century, not from the apostolic college.-We have weighed this thesis, and it is found wanting. There was certainly an elementary Gnosticism dating from apostolic times, and already combated by the Epistles of Paul and the letters of the Apocalypse ; and against it the First Epistle of John was directed. It has nothing in common with the great Gnostic systems of the second century, except the general tendenr.y ; and the fourth evangelist, far from being formed under their influence, furnished in his book part of the materials by means of which the chiefs of those schools constructed their edifices on the very ground of Christianity.

VIII. We come to the decisive point, the doctrine of tM logos. The J udeo-Alexandrine origin of this notion and term is historically proved ; and this alone suffices to prove that an apostle of Jesus cannot have written a book which rests wholly upon it. It must therefore be admitted that as Philo, the principal representative· of Alexandrinism at this period, made use of the views of Greek philosophy to account rationally for· the religious contents of his Jewish beliefs, so the author of the fourth Gospel in his turn made use of Philo to appropriate speculatively the contents of his Christian beliefs.1 Two facts give an apparent support to this explanation of the J ohannine teaching: 1. The term Logos inscribed over our Gospel, which is precisely that whereby Philo expresses the fundamental notion of his philosophy ; 2. The idea itself of an intermediate being between God and the world, by whom the absolute being communicates with finite beings. But to this the whole analogy is limited. And it remains to• inquire whether all the two writers have in common in this. respect is not explained by means of a higher source from which both drew, or whether the fourth evangelist was really formed in the school of the Alexandrine philosopher.2

1 See La doctrine du LO(IOS dans le quatrieme evangile, etc., by Jean R.;ville~ pp. 179 and 180. 2 Let it be remembered that Philo lived in the first century of our era, ani/1 CHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 231

In the latter case there may undoubtedly be differences of detail between them, but the same general tendency will necessarily appear in both. Now there is nothing of the kind. The notion of the Logos is in Philo's view a meta­ physical theory; in John it is a fact of divine love. In the case of the former, God, being raised above all particular determinations, cannot be apprehended by human reason, and cannot communicate with matter except by means of that being in whom He manifests Him .. elf; the Logos is the divine reason which conceives finite things, and realizes them in the material world. In John the notion of this being is, on the contrary, a postulate of eternal love. " For Thou lovedst me," says Jesus, " before the foundation of the world " (xvii 24); and to this love of God for the Logos there corresponds that of the Logos for God Himself : " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God;" literally, tended to God, moved toward God. This is no secondary difference ; we are face to face with two different tendencies: on the one side, that of philosophical speculation, the need of knowing; on the other, that of piety, the need of salvation. Not that I mean that all piety is wanting to Philo, and all need of knowing to John. But the matter in question here is the point of support for the two doctrines in the souls of the two writers. Related to this fundamental difference is the following fact. The doctrine of the Logos in Philo has its value in itself, as a notion indispensable to human speculation; in John the notion is solely at the service of a historical fact, a means of explaining what of divine the author perceived in the person of Jesus Christ. Reville complains again and again that the speculative statements regarding the nature and activity of the Logos "are extremely restricted in the prologue of John. . . . A little more speculation, for the clearness of the narrative, would not have been out of place" (pp. 37 and 38). There is a simplicity in this charge ; the young writer demands of the fourth Gospel that it be what assuredly it that he was a member of a rich Jewish family of Alexandria. .He wrote a large number of treatises on philosophical and religious subjects. in which he seeks to Bhow the relation between Jewish beliefs and Greek philosophies, especially those of Plato and of the Stoics. 232 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III. should have been, if it were what he would like it to be. He would make it a philosophical writing; and as it does not answer to this postulate, he censures it, instead of turning his criticism against his own theory. There is no philosophical speculation in the prologue, there is simply a conception of the person of Jesus expressed by means of a term which was then current in the language of philosophy. .And this term, besides, is taken in a wholly different sense from that belonging to it in speculation in general, and in that of Philo in particular. In the latter, the word Logos is used in the sense of reason; it denotes divine reason, whether as resident in God or as realized in the world of finite beings, m the sense in which the Stoics spoke of reason as diffused through all beings (o KOWO<; 'llhyo,; o Ota '1r{LVTWJJ Jpxoµevor;). Philo also calls it sometimes the idea of ideas (lola loewv), or the metropolis of ideas. It is the ideal of the finite world, in its totality and details, as existing in the divine understanding. In John the term Logos is evidently taken in the sense of word; this is its constant meaning in the Gospel, where it denotes divine revelation, and even in the prologue, where the creative word of Genesis is personified under this name. When Philo would express this notion, he adds to the word Logos (reason) the term pffµa (word, in the special sense of the term). So in the passage: "God creates both (the heavens and the earth) Trj, ea1Jrnu X6ryrp Mµan (by His owH Logos-word)." Or he employs only the second term: "The whole world was made oia MµaTO<; TOV aiTlov (by the word, the cau,se of things)." The difference arises from the fact that Philo moves in the sphere of speculation, John in that of divine action for the salvation of mankind. Moreover, how different is the part played by the Logos in the two ! The Logos of Philo is a universal principle, the general law of things ; it is not put into any relation to the person of the Messiah; while in John the Messiahis Himself this word incarnate, the gift given by the Father to the world, and whereby He comes to save it. The mere supposition of the incarnation of the Logos would be, whatever Reville may say, an enormity in the eyes of Philo. Does not sin arise from matter, and does not the defilement of the human soul proceed from its connection -CHAP. II.l THE AUTHOR. 233

with a body 1 What a blasphemy, then, would it be to !"epresent the Logos as having appeared in a human person with soul and body ! Besides, Philo's Messiah is nothing but .a mere man,1 who will bring back the Jews from their -dispersion, and restore to them the glorious state to which they are entitled. · Even in the spiritual world, the part played by the Logos -0.iffers entirely in Philo's view from what it is in that of John. In the latter, the Logos is the light of men (i. 4); and if there is darkness in the world, it is because the world has not known Him, Him who continues to act in His creation by enlightening every man (vv. 9 and 10). With Philo, the Logos is God's interpreter, no doubt, but not to men belonging to the order of the peifect. The true sage rises by the act of immediate contemplation to the knowledge of God without the mediation of the Logos. The Logos is the God of the imperfect, who, not being able to rise to the model, must be content to contemplate the portrait. Philo's Logos, says Dess, is a guide who does not conduct to the goal, God Himself; a God in whom one does not possess the true God. 'To speculate is to work on the Logos, on the divine reason manifested in the world ; but in this way no one will ever ,come to God Himself; He is not reached except in the way of immediate intuition which puts the Logos aside. Such is not the Logos of that fourth Gospel in which Jesus says: ·" I am the way, the truth, and the life ; no man cometh unto the Father but by me." Finally, the intention of the theory of the Logos in Philo fa to preserve God from all compromising contact with the material world. God is an absolutely transcendent being, who, without derogating from His glory, cannot connect Himself with the finite world. Reville, indeed, quotes a -certain number of instances in which God seems endowed with goodness and grace, and acts by Himself in the finite world. They are a relic of the influence exercised on the thought of the Jewish philosopher by the living monotheism ,of the Old Testament. We might add such passages to the numberless proofs of inconsequence which are found in Philo's

1 The heavenly apparition mentioned in De Oonsecrationibus, § 9, is human ,m its natnre. 234 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK HI-

speculation ; but it is also possible that he ascribes those divine communications to the action of God confounded with that of the Logos. The Di vine Being in John, He whom he calls absolutely God, is not an indeterminable essence; He is­ a person foll of will, action, and love; He is the .Father, who not only loves the Son whom He sacrifices, but also the world to whom He gives Him ; who by an inward teaching and a. drawing exercised on individual men, brings them to the Son : "No man," says Jesus, "can come to me except the .Father which bath sent me draw him. ... All that the Father giveth me shall come to me" (John vi. 44 and 3 7). This }father "Himself bears witness to the Son" by acts wrought in the domain of matter-miracles (ver. 36). He even makes an outwardly audible voice resound in the temple in answer to a prayer of Jesus (xii. 28). Thus the conception of John is so thoroughly the opposite of Philo's, that it makes the :Father an intermediate between Jesus and men, so that Jesus can pronounce the words, which would have been to Philo the height of absurdity: "Thine they were, and Thou gavest them me" (xvii. 6).1 The difference between John and Philo is so profound that Gess, one of those who has best studied both, has said : "The man who thinks he can unite the thought of John and that of Philo, understands nothing either in John or Philo." 2 It is not in certain details only, but in their very tendency that they diffcr.-And yet there are certain analogies between the two, as we have seen, whose cause it is necessary to find out. But is it so difficult to discover it '? Are not Philo and John both of them Jews, trained in the school of the law and the prophets 1 Three convergent lines in the Old Testament lead to one

1 See Gess, ii. p. 642 ff. • The defenders of the theory we are combating are so swayed by their preconceived idea, that without suspecting it they even fashion the texts they quote after their own taste. Thus we had exhibited this error of Colaui, who, in quoting the prayer of Jesus (John xii. 28), makes Him say: Father, glorify my name, instead of "glorify Thy name" (see our 2d ed.). Reville· falls into a similar mistake in quoting the same verse : " A voice came from heaven, and said, I have glorified Thee, and I will glorify Thee again [Thee• J,•sus]," while the real voice says, "I have both glorified it, and I will glorify· i.t. again [my name]." CHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 235 goal: 1. The notion of the word of God, as the manifestation of His all-powerful and creative will, in the finite world. Very often this principle of action in God is personified in the Old Testament. So when, in Ps. cvii. 20, it is said: "He sends His word, and it heals them;" or Ps. cxlvii. 15 : "He sends His word on the earth, and it runs swiftly ;" or Isa. lv. 11 : "My word shall do all things whereto I sent it." Yet this is evidently only a poetical personification. 2. The notion of Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, especially eh. viii. The author represents it as itself describing what it is to God : " He possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works.... I was His fellow-worker, and con­ tinually His delight." Still a simple poetical personification, undoubtedly. The word is a power of action; wisdom, an under&tanding and a conceived plan. 3. In several passages of Genesis there is mention of a being in whom Jehovah Himself appears in the sensible world. He is sometimes distinguished from Him by the name, .Angel of the Lord, sometimes confounded with Him by the manner in which He expresses Himself, saying, I, while speaking of Jehovah Himself. Several theologians regard Him only as an ordinary angel, not always the same perhaps, carrying out each time a special mission. Others refuse Him even personality, and regard Him merely as a sensible form, the transitory mode of appearing adopted by Jehovah Himself. These two inter­ pretations are disproved by the passage Ex. xxiii 21, where God says, in speaking of that Angel of the Lord, " Beware ! for He will not pardon your sin ; my name is in Him." The name is the reflection of the essence. Here this name is the reflection of God's holy essence, inflexible towards tbe obstinate purpose of sinning. Such a quality implies personality. We have to do therefore with a real person, having a divine character, and in whom God manifests Himself (my name-in Him). Moreover, this angel is called by Isaiah (lxiii 9) " The angel of the face " of Jehovah; and Malachi, at the close of the Old Testament, taking the last step, identifies Him with the Messiah: "Presently the Lord, whom ye seek, and the angel of the covenant, whom ye desire, shall enter into His temple ; behold, He cometh, saith the Lord of Hosts." ln tbi.s third view we find not merely divine 236 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IIL understanding or force personified, but a living Divine Being, Him who is to come to save His people as the Messiah.­ These so remarkable indications did not remain unnoticed by ancient Jewish doctors. They seem to have endeavoured at an early period to make those three lines converge in a single idea : that of the Being of whom God makes use every time. He puts Himself into relation to the external world. They designated Him sometimes by the names Slukinah (habitation) or Jekara (brightness); sometimes, and most frequently, by the name l,tiemar or Memra di Jehovah ( Word of the Lord). The Chaldee paraphrases of the Old Testament, called Targums, constantly introduce this Being, where the Old Testament simply speaks of the Lord. These writings, it is true, date only perhaps from the third or fourth century of our era; but, as Schiirer says, it is beyond doubt that these paraphrases rest on older works, and are the result of elaboration century after century. Fragments are preserved of similar writings dating from the second century before Christ, from the time of John Hyrcanus. Even before the destruction of Jerusalem, mention is made of a Targum on the Book of Job, and the Mischna (of the second century after Christ) speaks of translations of the Bible into Chaldee.1 It is infinitely less probable, besides, that the Jewish theologians should have accepted from the Christians a notion so favourable to the religion of the latter. Now, the following are some examples of the manner in which those doctors paraphrase the Old Testament. It is said, Gen. xxi. :J 0, in speaking ofishmael: "God was with the lad;" the paraphrase says : " The Word of Jehovah was with the lad." In xxviii 21, where Jacob says: "Then shall the Lord be my God," the Targum makes him say : " The Word of Jehovah shall be my God." xxxix. 21, instead of: "The Lord was with Joseph" ..., "The Memra (the Word) was with Joseph." Ex. xix. 1 7, instead of: " And Moses brought forth the people to meet with God" . . ., ".A..nd Moses brought forth the people to meet with the word of Jehovah." Num. xxii. 20, instead of : " God came to Balaam " . . ., " The Word of Jehovah came to Balaam." Deut. iv. 24, instead of : " God is a consuming fire" . . ., " The Word of Jehovah is a consuming fire." Isa. i. 14, instead of: " My soul hateth your new 1 Schurer, Lelirbuch d~ N. T. Zeitge,ackichte; p. 4711. CHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 237 moons " . . .. " My Word hateth" . . xlii. 1, instead of : " My soul delighteth in Him " . . ., " My Word delighteth •· . . ., etc. etc. It is therefore indisputable that at the time when John wrote, the Jewish theology had already marked by the special name of Word the idea of the God who enters into relation to the external world. The reader will have remarked that this form is particularly used in the passages where Scripture ascribes to God a human feeling such as repentance, dislike, complacency, hatred. The question now is whether those doctors represented this manifested God as a real and distinct person from God Him­ self. It is possible on this point, as on the nature of the Logos of Philo, to adduce passages of opposite meaning. Gess things it incompatible with the notion of a real person when, in the passage 1 Kings viii. 15, the Targum substitutes for the expressions : the month and the hand of Jehovah, the word (.Memar) and the will of Jehovah, the former as declaring, the latter as executing. So J er. xxxii. 41, or again Gen. xxii. 16, where the Targum makes the Lord say: "I swear by my word," instead of: " I swear by myself." But in a domain so mysterious and obscure, is it necessary to suppose the paraphrasts systematically consequent with themselves ? Be­ sides, it seems to me much more difficult to explain bow God should swear by His word, if it is not a person like Him, than if it is a personal being; and as to the former passage, the term v;ord seems to recover its ordinary meaning, for the two terms " word " and " will " correspond to the two actions : speaking and acting. It is impossible not to find the notion of personality in all these passages : "My Word hates" . . ., " My Word takes pleasure " . . ., " The Word shall be my God," " the Word will fight for you," "the Brightness of Jehovah rose and said." All the more that in many passages, instead of the Word or the Brightness of Jehovah, it is the angel of the Lord who is substituted for the simple name of Jehovah, for example Ex. iv. 24 and Judg. iv. 14. Gess objects that if this theory of a second divine person called tbe Word of Jehovah had been received in Palestine at this period, it could not be altogether wanting in the writings of St. Paul But this apostle's teaching is drawn from the revelation which he had received, and not from the lessons of his old roasters 238 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOS1'EL. [BOOK III.

Paul possibly found no call in the circumstances, and at the time when he taught, to use the term; while in the great centre of Ephesus, at the end of the first century, John found himself in surroundings which attracted his particular attention to it. The passages 1 Cor. viii. 6, where creation is ascribed to Christ, and 1 Cor. x. 5, where Christ is repre­ sented as the guide of Israel in the wilderness, show in any case that the notion itself was as familiar to him as to John; and that is the essential point. If the matter be well weighed, the paraphrasts, by refusing to God all human emotions to attribute them to the Memar (the Word), thereby give the seal of personality to this mani­ fested God in a yet more pronounced way than to God Himself. But perhaps it is with them as with Philo, whose notion regarding the personality of the Logos seems somewhat fluctu­ ating. Zeller has well shown the cause of this oscillation in the philosopher's mind. On the one hand, the Logos mu.qt belong to God's essence, which seems to make Him a simple divine attribute (divine reason or wisdom), and consequently to exclude personality; on the other hand, He must be in relation with matter, so as to penetrate it with the particular types on which finite things are formed, and this function supposes a being distinct from God and consequently personal. A similar observation may be made regarding the Orientnl paraphrasts; and this resemblance would not be at all asto11- ishing, if, as Schurer thinks, the philosophy of Philo exercised an influence on their exegesis.1 We can now conclude. Philo was formed above all in the school of the Old Testament; there he had learned, from all the facts we have mentioned above, the existence of a personal or impersonal Being, by means of whom God acted on the world when He put Himself in relation to it. And he thought he could interpret the idea of this Being, philosophically explaining it by means of the Logos, or divine reason, of the Greek philosophers. And hence he calls it sometimes Logos or second God (oevTepo~ '9eo~), when he is speaking as a disciple of these schools, and sometimes Archangel, High Priest, Son, First-born Son, when he resumes Jewish language. So true is it that the porch and the academy furnished him with the 1 Schlirer, Literatur-Zeitung, 1878, No. 17. 'CHAP. IL] THE AUTHOR. 239 key of his Judaism, that in one instance he goes the length of saying: "the immortal ideas (a0dvaro£ X6,yo£) which we [Jews] call angels." John, on his side, was also in the school of the Old Testa­ ment ; he also learned from this sacred book the existence of that Being, sometimes distinct from the Lord, sometimes con­ founded with Him, with whom God conversed when He said : "Let us make man in our image;" who participated, conse­ quently, in the creative act; who communicates life to all things, but who has especially impressed every human soul with the impress of His light; who, finally, is the permanent agent of the theophanies of the Old Testment. John is so penetrated with this point of view, that in the person of A.donai, the Lord, who calls Isaiah (eh. vi.) to the prophetic ministry, he recognises that same Divine Being who in Jesus Christ afterwards manifested His glory in a human life (John xii. 41); 1 exactly as St. Paul recognises the Divine Being manifested in Obrist, in the leader of Israel across the desert (1 Cor. x. 4) ; and as, finally, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews attributes to the Son the creation and preservation of all things, as well as the sacrifice of purification for our sins (Heb. i. 1-3). But this is the difference between J obn and Philo : instead of going from the Old Testament to the schools of Plato and the Stoics, John passed to that of Jesus. And when he beheld in Him that unique glory, full of divine grace and truth, which he has described John i 14; when he heard such declarations as these : " He that bath seen me, bath seen the Father " . • • ; " Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world;" "Before A.bra ham was, I am,"-he understood who He was whom he had before him, and without difficulty achieved that fusion in his mind between the eternal agent of God and the Christ, which had not entered into the mind of the A.lexandrine philosopher. Philo, is the Old Testament explained by Greek philosophy; John, is the Old Testament completed and explained by Jesus Christ.2

1 '' Isaiah said these things when he saw His glory and spake of Him [Christ].•• s It is evident how many errors are contained in the opinion of Jean Reville, which may be thus expressed : "Alexandrine theology is the synthesis -0f Judaism and Greek philosophy, and the doctrine of John in turn is the 240 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK Ill.

As to the term Logos on which John fixed to designate­ the Divine Being whom he had recognised in the person o:f> Christ, it was furnished to him, as we have seen, by the Old Testament; the part which the Word of God plays in that book, particularly in the account of the creation, was enough tCl make him prefer this term to every other. That of Sun, a~ Gess rightly says, expressed only the personal relation between God and the Divine Being whom John wished to characterize_ The term Word, on the contrary, expressed His double relation on the one side to the God who is revealed in Him, and on the other to the world to which He manifests Himself. And if the name Word was already used in the Jewish schools (as. seems evident from the paraphrases), it is all the more intel­ ligible why it should have presented itself first to the mind of the apostle. It is remarkable that this title appears as a designation of Christ in the three Johannine writings (Gosp i 1; 1st Ep, i. 1-3; Rev. xix. 13), and in them only. It is like an indissoluble bond which unites them. The fact tha1. this name occurs even in the Apocalypse, the author of which­ is certainly free from all suspicion of Alexandrinism, completei,c· the proof that its source is Jewish, and not at all Philonic. Finally, being established at Ephesus, that focus of religious; syncretism to which all philosophic doctrines flowed from Persia, Greece, and Egypt, John might often have heard in the religious and philosophical lectures or conversations, the term Word applied to the manifested God. In inscribing it­ over his narrative, it ,ras therefore as if he had said : "That Logos, about which you speculate without really coming to­ know Him, we possess, we Christians. We have seen and 1 heard Him, and it is He whose history we proceed to relate." · It is thus clear that there is nothing to compromise the- synthesis of this Alexandrine theology with Christian tradition." We believe that Alexandrine theology is foreign to the teaching of John, and that his­ teaching, instead of resting on Christian tradition, is a personal testimony (John i. 14; 1 John i. 1-4). 1 Neander, Apost. Zeitalter, ii. p. 649: "John wished to guide those who0 were much occupied with specnlations about the Logos from their religious­ iclealism to a religious realism. • • • Instead of trying to fathom what is hiddeu and cannot be reached, every one was called to come and behold Him who was. manifested in a human nature ;-to believe and make trial, as John himselt testified of what he had seen and made trial. " CHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 241

Johannine origin of the fourth Gospel in this term Logos, on which criticism fastens with ferocity, and which it turns to account in a way which does but poor honour to its scientific impartiality.

IX. .After setting aside all these arguments, Hase acknow­ ledges himself overcome by a ninth and last, which is to this effect : Certain particulars in our fourth Gospel have a legend­ ary stamp, and cannot have been related by an eye-witness; for example, the description of John the Baptist and the first disciples of Jesus, the change of water into wine and the multiplication of the loaves, finally, the appearances of Jesus raised from the dead. Hase long thought he could escape the force of this argument, by holding that John was not present when the facts which gave rise to those legends transpired. He now admits that that was a forced expedient, and lays down his arms. - The answer attempted by the theologian was in fact but a poor evasion, and he does well to give it up. But the argument before which the veteran of Jena yields, has not more value for all that; for it amounts simply, however Hase may think he can affirm to the contrary, to the question of the supernatural.

X. Baur has insisted mainly on the argument taken from the Paschal controversy, at the end of the second century, but from a different viewpoint from that from which we have fllready treated this question (p. 228). In fixing on the 14th Nisan as the day of Christ's death, which the Synoptics placed on the 15th, the author of the fourth Gospel sought, according to Baur, to root out the Paschal rite of the churches of .Asia, which celebrated Easter on the evening of the 14th. In fact, he thus displaces the day of Christ's last meal, and throws it back to the evening of the 13th. Now, as it was at this meal that Jesus instituted Easter, the author thereby creates a conflict between the Gospel history and the .Asiatic rite. A.nd as John must have been the author of this rite, he cannot have composed a Gospel intended to combat it.-The argument rests on the idea that an annual commemorative festival is celebrated on the day when the festival was insti­ tuted, and not on the day on which the event giving rise to it GOllET I. Q JOHN. 242 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III. took place. Every one will immediately perceive the falsity in this point of view. Besides, we have already shown that the narrative of John on this point is historically justified, and that by the Synoptics themselves (p. 100). It is not therefore invented in the interest of ecclesiastical tactics. The rite of the churches of .Asia probably depended, not on any date whatever in the history of the Passion, but on the day of the Paschal feast in the Old Testament. In any case, had the evangelist wished to favour the Roman church which cele­ brated the holy Paschal Supper on the Sunday of the resur­ rection, and to combat the .Asiatic rite which placed it on the evening of the 14th, it served no purpose to place the institution of the Holy Supper on the evening of the 13th; to have been of any avail, it must have been placed on Sunday morning, and made the first act of Jesus after His resurrection l (For more details, see the commentary at the end of eh. xix.)

XI. The difference in matter and form between the Gospel and the Apocalypse. The impossibility of referring these two writings to the same author had become a sort of axiom in i;riticism. In consequence, it was judged that the .Apocalypse, having older and more positive testimonies on its side than the Gospel, it was right to give it the preference, and to reject the J ohannine origin of the latter. So even Baur, Hilgenfeld, and many others reason. But the dilemma on which this con­ clusion rests is now more and more disputed. It is positively set aside by Hase, who cites as an analogy the marked differ­ ence between the first and second parts of Goethe's Faust; nay more, he thinks that the Apocalypse, bearing testimony to' John's sojourn in Asia, thereby rather confirms the tradition relative to the Gospel.1 W eizsacker cannot avoid aclmow­ ledging that, notwithstanding the difference of authorship, the .Apocalypse is "in organic connection with the spirit of the Gospel." 2 Baur himself has borne testimony to the radical identity of the two writings, by calling the Johannine Gospel "a spiritualized Apocalypse." If, indeed, it can be demon­ strated that we must interpret the poetical imagoo and plastic forms of the Apocalypse spiritually, wherein does it still differ , Geschichte Juu, pp. 29----31, 1 Untersuch. p. 295. THE AUTHOR. 243

from the Gospel, according to this declaration of Baur hiinself1 Let us add that the superiority which is attributed to the testimony of tradition relative to the Apocalypse, is a fictit,n, which becomes none the more true for being continually repeated.1 Keim and Scholten find the Apocalypse as insuffi­ ciently attested as the Gospel, and reject them both. In our eyes, a choice between the two writings is by no means necessary, for they distinctly bear the seal of their composition by one and the same author. And in the outset (1) in respect of style. The charge brought against the author of the Apocalypse of sinning against the rules of grammar or of Greek syntax, is one of those errors which it would be well to cease repeating. The preposition a7ro, from, is construed (i. 4) with the nominatives o &Iv (who is) and o epxoµevor; (who cometh). Barbarism! is the cry. The Gospel, on the contrary, is written in correct Greek.­ But in the same verse (i. 4) we find this same preposition a7ro, .from, regularly construed with the genitive Twv E'TrTJ, 7rvevµaTwv (from the seven spirits). And it is the same, without a single exception, throughout the whole of the rest of the book l The construction which is accused, far from being a scholar's mistake, is therefore the bold anomaly of a master who wished to paint, by the immutability of the word, that of the subject designated-God. A number of appositions in the nominative to substantives in the genitive or dative are alleged. Comp. ii. 20 (Tisch.), iii. 12, etc. But at every turn we find in the same book appositions in their regular cases (comp. i. 10, 11, iii. 10, etc.). In the opposite cases the author, by bravin;; grammar, evidently wished to give greater independence to the appositional substantive or participle. The Gospel again and again furnishes us with analogous irregularities (comp. vi. 39, xvii. 2, etc.).-Again, it is remarked that the Gospel makes use of ubstract terms, whereas the Apocalypse loves to clothe the idea in a figure. The one will say life where the other says living fountains of wetter; the one light where the other says the lamp of the holy city; the one the world, the other the Gentiles ; the one death, the other the second

1 The matter in question is especially the testimony which Justin bears to the Apocalypse; now we have seen what follows in favour of the Gospel, from the testimony ot' the same Justin, from that of Papias, and from that of eh. xxi. 244 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III. death, etc. etc. For answer, it is enough with Hase to remark that "the Apocalypse uses the forms of poetry which are sensible (sinnlich)." Neither should we forget that the Apocalypse is the work of ecstasy and vision, and that John conceived it ev 'TTVEvµ,aTt (rapt in spirit), while the Gospel is the calrn and collected reproduction of simple historical memories, and that it is written iv vot (in a state of settlP-d judgment).1-0bjection is also taken to the .Aramaisms of the Apocalypse, which form a contrast to the Hellenic correctness of the Gospel. Here acconnt must be taken of a decisive fact. The Apocalypse is written under the constant influence of the prophetic delineations of the Old Testament, the style of which consequently distils on its own, while the Gospel simply relates the events of which the author was a witness~ independently of every foreign model. In such different con­ ditions of redaction, as the Dutch critic Niermeyer2 has justly said, the entire absence of difference between the two writings (supposing that both proceeded from the same author) would furnish reason for "legitimate astonishment." Winer has remarked how much more decidedly .Aramaic is the style of Josephus when he relates the Old Testament history, and is under the influence of the sacred narratives, than when he describes the events which happened under his own eyes. But with all that, what real and radical unity of style between those two writings in the eyes of every one who goes beyond the surface ! In this relation we recommend Niermeyer's excellent essay (seep. 27). The same favourite expressions : to make a lie; to do the truth; to keep the com­ mandments or the Word; to hunger and thirst, to indicate the profound wants of the soul ; the term Amen, Amen, which so­ often begins the declarations of Jesus in the fourth Gospel, be­ coming in the Apocalypse the personal name of Christ Himself, the figure of the Lamb, applied in the Gospel (with the term aµ,vo,;) to the victim burdened with the sin of the world, and used in the Apocalypse with the neuter and more forcible term apv{ov to denote the glorified Lord, and to form the counterpart of the term 017p{ov, the Beast. Finally, the name Word, or Word of God, given to Christ, which belongs only

1 Comp. on this difference, 1 Cor. xiv. 14, 15. 2 ReYiewed by Busken-Huet, Revue de Thealogie, September 1856. CHAI'. II.] THE AUTHOR. 245 to the three J ohannine writings in the whole of the New Testament, and connects them as by an indissoluble bond of union. To these analogies of expression let us add that of .:,ntire delineations; for example, Rev. iii. 20, where the author describes the intimate communion of Christ with the believer : " Behold, I stand at the door and knock ; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me;" which comp. with John xiv., more particularly with ver. 23: "We will come to him, and make our abode with him." Or the descrip­ tion of the heavenly blessedness of believers, Rev. vii. 15-17: "And He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more ; . . . for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters : and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." Here we find united several of the characteristic expressions of the J ohannine style: O"K'l}vovv ev (to dwell in a tent), comp. John i. 14, w-e,v~v, oiv~v (to hitnger, thirst), Gos. vi. 35; w-oiµ,alvetv (to feed), x. 1-16, xxi. 16; 0&1]7e'iv (to lead), xvi. 13; and does not the last trait, depicting God's tenderness, recall the expres­ sion of Jesus, xiv. 21 : "He that loveth me shall be loveJ of my Father" 1-A last analogy, which puts a seal on the pre­ ceeding, is found in the q notation of Zechariah ( xii 10 ), Rev. i. 7, where the author corrects the translation of the LXX. exactly as is done by the auth01· of the Gospel, John xix. 37. 2. In respect of matter, the harmony between the two writings is not less remarkable. It is sometimes said that the God of the Apocalypse is a God of wrath, while the God of the Gospel is all love. It seems to be forgotten that it is in the Gospel that we find the threatening : " Vlhosoever obeyeth not the Son, the wrath of God abideth on him" (iii. 36), and this other: "Ye shall seek me, but ye shall die in your sins" (viii. 24); and, on the other hand, that it is the author of the Apocalypse who twice reproduces (vii. 17 and xxi. 4) that promise of Isaiah, the tenderest of all contained in Scripture: "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes." Love rules in the Gospel, because this book describes the first coming of the Son of God 246 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK m.. as a Saviour; severity in the Apocalypse, because it is the description of the second coming of the Son as Judge. The Christology of the Apocalypse is identical with that of' the Gospel We have already shown (p. 14 7) that the designa­ tion of Christ as ;, apxn -rij,; ,c-r{

Jewish origin, let the words be read, xxi. 2 and 3: "I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down from heaven from the presence of God, and I heard a great voice from heaven saying, Behold the tabernacle of God in the midst of men." And, as if to leave no doubt as to the meaning of the word men, the author adds : "And they [they who were not His people J shall be His peoples, and God Himself shall be with them, their God." In speaking of the final Jerusalem, Niermeyer simply forgets that that future Jerusalem is by no means a restoration of the old, and that the author describes it as a new Jerusalem coming down from heaven from the presence of God. It is the church in its entire extent and in all its perfection, embracing everything in the whole range of humanity, which has been given to Christ. We here find the widest universalism. And if it is so with the holy city itself, we must, of course, extend the same process of spiritual interpretation to all that forms its beauty : the gates, the walls, the square, the river, the trees. And all these figures, spiritually understood, guide us directly, if the Gospel is really a spiritualized Apocalypse (Baur), to this result: that the Apocalypse is radically identical with the Gospel A general comparison of the apocalyptic drama with the narrative contained in our Gospel leads us also to hold their identity of authorship. The contrary, no doubt, is affirmed. It is said : the Apocalypse breathes the most burning hatred against the Gentiles, it is by a Jewish author; the Gospel reserves all its hatred for the Jews, it is by a Gentile author. Again it is said : the Apocalypse moves in the scenes of the last times, which are unknown to the Gospel; the latter, on the contrary, points only to the hostile relation of Jesus to the Jews during His sojourn on the earth. These two objections fall to the ground before a single observation. The work of Jesus is twofold. In the first place it concerned the Jews, then came the tirnes of the Gentiles, when salvation was offered to the latter. The Gospel relates the first of these relations, the Apocalypse treats of the second; and the two writings complete one another as the two halves of one and the same whole, which might be entitled: The substitution of the kingdom of God for that of Satan throughout the whole earth. The actors, too, in both dramas are at bottom the 252 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK m. same. They are these three : Ghrist, faith, unbelief. In the Gospel : the Christ, as Chrii:st in His humiliation ; faith, represented by the diseiples; unbelief, represented by the Jews. In the .Apocalypse: the Christ, as glorified Lord; faith, repre­ sented by the Bride or the Church; unbelief, by the Gentiles, the majority of whom reject the Gospel call, just as the majority of the Jews rejected it in the time of Jesus. There is therefore no partiality in this book. On the one hand, we have believing Gentiles, innumerable in multitude, whom the author beholds with transport triumphing before the throne, exactly as during the life of Jesus there had been believing Jews raised to the most intimate communion with Hirn. On the other, a mass of unbelieving Gentiles, who more and more draw down on them the judgments of the glorified Lord (seals, trumpets, vials), precisely as the mass of the Jews became more and more hardened and embittered against the Lamb of God in the midst of them. The only difference between the two dramas, the evangelic and apocalyptic,-and the difference belongs to the very nature of the things,-is, that in the former there are related the Passion and the resurrection, the foundations of redemption for all ; in the latter, Christ's second coming as the consummation of salvation and judg­ ment for all. This difference is one bond more between the two writings; for thereby the Apocalypse assumes the Gospel all through, behind it, so to speak, and the Gospel the .Apocalypse, as it were, before it ; and we thus understand whence arises the almost complete absence of the eschatological element in the Gospel The progress and phases of the struggle, there with the Jews, here with the Gentiles, are also entirely similar. In both books the end seems near from the beginning. But it is constantly deferred ; the reader expects it in the Apocalypse after the sixth seal, after the sixth trumpet; it is ever adjourned again as in the Gospel, where John repeats the words again and again: "But His hour was not yet come." The catastrophe also is radically the same, though in two different forms : an external victory of Satan over the king­ dom of God: in the Gospel, by the murder of Jesus; in the Apocalypse, by the extermination of the church under the Antichrist; but in both eases a victory, first spiritual, then CHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 253 shortly after external, of the champion of the cause of God; there, by the resurrection of the Christ ; here, by the glorification of the church. The whole is clear: the only difference is in the two subjects: on the one hand, the Christ come ; on the other, the Christ coming. But for the rest the one book seems to be traced over the other, both as to the part of the actors and as to the progress of the action. To place these two works in opposition to each other, it fa necessary, as Luthardt says, to materialize the one and spiritualize the other to excess. By this artifice it is possible to dazzle the vulgar, but this is no longer science ; it is fiction. The two books are there, and soouer or later truth resumes its rights. If the results of our study are well founded, all the external proofs in favour of the J ohannine origin of the Apocalypse, to which Baur, Hilgenfeld, Volkmar attach so great value, become so many confirmations of the J ohannine origin of our Gospel

XII. There is an objection which seems to have produced the decisive impression on the mind of our French critics, such as Renan and Sabatier. John is called in the fourth Gospel the disciple whom Jesus loved; here is a marked superiority which is ascribed to him in relation to his colleagues. This is not all; he is constantly exalted so as to become in every respect the equal of Peter, or even to surpass him, not only in agility, but also in discernment and quickness of faith. This spirit of jealousy and petty rivalry cannot have been that of John himself; it must therefore be held that the redaction, at least of our Gospel, is due to a disciple of the apostle, who wished at any cost to exalt the person and part of the venerated master whose narratives and lessons he had col­ lected. We are evidently here face to face with a process of tendency. There are facts related; with what view 1 One answers : Because they happened so; the other seeks secret intentions, and soon discovers them ; he ascribes the facts to the narrator's imagination, moved by some particular view. It is a grave matter to found conclusions which may have decisive consequences for the church on such processes of interpretation. In the particular case it turns out that the 254 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL.· LBOOK III. supposed intention is in manifest contradiction to a very large number of facts. In eh. i. 43, Peter, it is true, is only the third to come to Jesus. But if this were to exalt J obn at his expense, the author, who does not trouble himself with history, should ascribe to John himself the part of introducing Peter to Jesus. This is what he does not do; he attributes this honour to Andrew, Peter's own brother,-an expression by which he explains the part of Andrew, and accounts for it historically. As to John, be is not directly designated in this scene, either under his own name or by any paraphrase whatever. Not only so, but in ver. 41, even before Andrew brings Peter, when he is for the first time introduced on the scene, he is already designated as Simon Peter's brother, that Peter who had not yet appeared, and who is thus presented from the outset as the principal personage of the whole Gospel history by the side of Jesus. Finally, as if all that were not yet sufficient in the eyes of the author suitably to exalt the person and part of Peter, Jesus at His first look discerns in him His chief sup­ porter, and distinguishes him by a surname of high honour, while He does nothing of the kind in regard to the four or five other disciples who are called on the same occasion. And it is in this scene that men have the talent to discover the inten­ tion of depreciating Peter or exalting John !-Ch. vi. places us again in the midst of the apostolic circle. Who plays a part in this confidential scene ? It is Philip or Andrew, the latter again designated as Simon Peter's brother (vv. 5 and 8). Then at the close of the whole narrative, when in view of the defection of nearly all the Galilean disciples one of the apostles stands forth to answer this question of Jesus: "Will ye also go away?" who is he to whom the evangelist gives the post of honour, and who in the name of all proclaims his indestructible faith in the Messiahship of Jesus ? Is it John ? Is it some less known disciple, whose rivalry would be less dangerous to this apostle ? It is Peter himself, he whom our evangelist wishes to disparage !-At the last meal, Peter beckons to John, who is seated close to Jesus, to ask him to put a question to the Master. But if the fact really tran­ spired thus, what is to be concluded from it? And who could seriously affirm the contrary 1 Is it an impossibility '? Does not the account which follows really prove, by an insignificant -CHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 255

.circumstance, that Peter was not by the side of Jesus ? ~vv. 5 and fi). Finally, in the same passage, does not the -evangelist ascribe to Peter a saying in which his whole devo- -tion, his whole faith breaks out: "Lord, not my feet only, but my hands and my head!" (xiii. 9). The conversations which follow the meal offered the evangelist a fine opportunity of putting on the stage his favourite disciple, him whom Jesus loved. We are told of the questions of Thomas, Philip, Jude ; but there is not the slightest allusion to the presence of this disciple. Peter's cry of devotion: "I will lay down my life for Thee," is cited; are we to suppose this a piece of Machi­ avellism the better to mark his presumption, and the better to throw into relief afterwards his denial 1 But as to this fall of Peter, John is precisely the evangelist who relates it in the gentlest form. There is no oath, no curse in the mouth of Peter; the simple word, he said. Peter is introduced into the high priest's house by anothe1· disciple who was known to that personage; but there is nothing to tell us that this disciple was John. And even if it were John, it would be slender honour in a writing whose tendency is said to be so strongly anti-Jewish, to have been on intimate terms with the spiritual head of the nation. At Gethsemarn) it is Peter who, in our Gospel, strikes with the sword. Judged in relation to the mind of Jesus, the act is undoubtedly wrong, but contrasted with the cowardice of the other disciples, who all flee, it is certainly an honour. Peter does not fear to put into practice the profession of devotion which he had made.­ On the morning of the resurrection, when the two disciples run to the sepulchre, John arrives soonest, and this is said to be one of those calculated events whereby the superiority of this apostle is asserted over his colleague..•. Men have the hardihood to write such puerilities ! If it is so, let them at least abstain from calling such a book, with Hilgenfeld, " the Gospel of the eagle flight!" Immediately after, on simply seeing the order which reigns in the sepulchre, John rises to faith in the resurrection (xx. 8), while it is not said that it was so with Peter. Here is a point which seems a little more susprc1011s. But this is precisely one of the most decidedly .autobiographical traits of the fourth Gospel. The point in 11uestion is the most intimate, that o: faith, and John simply 256 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III tells us how this result was wrought in him. Could he te1! so exactly what passed in his colleague? Whether the light broke also in his heart at that moment and in that way?' Perhaps it remained unknown to himself to the last. But as Paul and Luke both tell us of an appearance of the risen Jesus granted to Peter that same day, the circumstance renders­ it probable that this apostle remained near the tomb with a confused presentiment, which was not transformed into real faith till His appearance. Let us observe in passing, that no­ special appearance granted to John is mentioned. There remains the scene of eh. xxi. If the writer really wished to establish a parallel between the two apostles, it must be acknowledged that the contrast is all in favour of Peter. John, it is true, discerns the Lord from the boat, but. he does not move from the place, while Peter leaps immedi­ ately into the water. John does not play the slightest part in the conversation which follows the meal ; Peter is the only object of the Lord's attention. Not only does Jesus restore­ him as an apostle, but He expressly confides to him the direc­ tion of the church, and even that of the apostolate : "Feed my lambs; guide my sheep." And as the crown of his ministry, He promises him the honour of a bloody martyrdom. Thereafter it is he, he only, whom He invites to follow Him, to receive in close conversation the communications which He has yet to make to him. The disciple whom Jesus loved takes the liberty, without being called, to walk modestly behind them ; it is Peter himself who brings him on the scene by the question which he puts somewhat indiscreetly to the Lord in regard to him. But, it is said, John's superiority reappears in this very place; for the promise made to him, that he should not die, eclipses even that of martyrdom made to Peter. Be it so ; only the evangelist's explanation which follows would require not to invalidate immediately that pretended promise ! What a contrast be­ tween the two sayings, the one relative to John: " Yet Jesus­ said not, He shall not die;" the other, relative to Peter· •• Now this He said of the death by which Peter should glorify God." There remains in reality only one word which can be­ turned to account in support of the obiection we are combat- 0fJAP. 1f.j THE AUTHOR. 257 ing ; it is the designation, the disciple whom Jesus loved. Weisse, I believe, was the first to take offence at the expression, and to see in it a repulsive vainglory. Sabatier thinks that if John had written it himself, " it would be difficult to put humility among his virtues." How much more delicate and how much more just the judgment which Hase shows! "Weisse," says he, "did not understand the joyous pride of being in all humility the object of the most unmerited love." Of all the rays of that glory, full of grace and truth, which had been displayed here below by the Word made flesh, there was one which had fallen on John, and which he must reproduce in his narrative: the Son of God had carried His condescension so far as to have a friend. To recall so sweet a memory was not pride, it was humble gratitude. To disguise his own name under this periphrasis was not to glorify the man, it was to exalt the tenderness of Him who had deigned to stoop so low. He knew himself just as the grace-saved believer knows himself, as the object of the most amazing love. So it is that Paul speaks of him­ self (2 Cor. xii. 2-5).

XIII. Long ago we expressed the conviction that Reuss' position in regard to the fourth Gospel was untenable. To hold the apostolic origin of the book, and at the same time to regard the discourses contained in it as forming together a. treatise of mystical theology which the author at his own hand has put into the mouth of Jesus . . . that is an evident moral impossibility. Reuss was bound to seek a way of escape from this contradiction, and he has recently found it. It is the passage xix. 35.1 Following the example of Weiss, Schweizer, Keim, W eizsacker, he thinks he sees in this passage the perfectly clear distinction laid down by the author of the Gospel himself between his person and that of the apostle John, who furnished him orally with the authentic materials of his narrative.-Let us study this text more closely. It is composed of three propositions : "And he that saw bare witness ; and his witness is true ; and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe." Till now it had been thought that it was the witness himself who was speaking here. 1 Theologie}ohannique, p. 103. GODET I. R JOHN. 258 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III.

(1) He declares that his witness regarding the fact related (the simultaneous fulfilment of the two prophecies by the ap­ parently accidental spear-thrust of the Roman soldier) is now given (the perfect µEµaprVp'TJICE) : it is a thing done, done by this very recital; comp. i. 34; (2) he attests the truth of the witness borne; (3) he makes protestation of the inward con­ viction which he has in himself of the reality of the fact related, and that in order that the readers (ye) may also give it full faith. In this third proposition the a1dhor uses the pronoun EJCeZvoi;, he (that one), in speaking of the witness; and in this word many find a proof that he is speaking of the witness as a person different from himself, and who can be no other than the apostle. But, first of all, the author may perfectly spe:tk of himself in the third person, as Paul does, 2 Cor. xii. 2-5, or like Jesus Himself, when He habitually designates Himself under the name of the Son of man ; and consequently he may use the pronoun of the third person in all its forms. But if be here chooses the pronoun e,ce'ivoi;, that one, it is because the word has a particular and constant meaning in the fourth Gospel. It there denotes a being who possesses a certain character or a certain function exclusively; not, consequently, a remote person in opposition to another nearer, but one single person, in contrast to every other ; so i. 18 : " No man hatb seen God at any time . • ., the only - begotten Son, He (iKe'ivo,;) bath declared Him;" or xii. 48: "My word .•. it, it is, it alone (EKEtvoi;), which shall judge him;" comp. v. 39: "The Scriptures ... it is they (J,ce'i:vat) which" •.. ; xvi. 14: '' The Spirit ..., it is He (eKE'ivo,;) who shall glorify me," etc. Jesus, too, in speaking of Himself, adopted this pronoun as His designation; comp. ix. 37: "Thou hast seen Him (the Son of God), and He that speaketh to thee is He (J,ce'ivoi;)." 1 It is exactly so in xix. 3 5. He designates himself by this pronoun as the man who, having been the sole witness of the fact among the apostles, can alone attest it with the certainty of an eye-witness. There is not therefore one well-founded

' Reuss objects that in the passage ix. 37 the pronoun ,,.,,,,; denotes the pre· dicate, while in xix. 35 it refers to the subject of the sentence. What matter! In both cases it is still the very one who speaks who designates Himself by thi.. pronoun. -OHAP. II.J THE AUTHOR. 259

logical or grammatical objection to the most generally received meaning of the passage. See now the meaning which the fore-mentioned writers seek to give it. lst Proposition: The editor of the Gospel declares that it .vas the witness (the apostle) who informed him of the circum­ -stance he has just related.-This meaning is not impossible, though it is somewhat surprising to see the distinction between these two personages breaking through all of a sudden, while not the faintest trace of it had thus far appeared. 2d Proposition: The writer attests the truth of the account which he has from the mouth of the witness.-This is far from natural, for it would rather be for the witness to attest the truth of the fact related by the evangelist. An unknown and anonymous editor, posing as security for the account of the witness, and that witness an apostle . . . ! This would be strange enough. Whence would he derive such a right and authority? 3d Proposition: The editor attests the profound conviction which the witness cherishes of the reality of the fact related. "'' He knows (the apostle-witness) that he saith true." This becomes wholly unintelligible ; for how can one testify of what is passing in the inmost soul of another individual 1 One might understand the editor saying: "And I know that he saith true." That would mean : Being such as I know him, I have the certainty that he cannot lie. But with the form: " he knoweth (he) that he saith true" • . ., this declaration has no meaning. Finally, the editor adds : " that ye might believe." If it is John who says this to express the object of the narrative which he has just put in writing, we understand what he means: "As for me, the witness, I have the profound consciousness that what I tell you is true, that ye also (who read) rnay believe (as well as myself who saw)." His testi­ mony is to become, for those who read, what the sight itself was to him. But if, on the contrary, the matter in question is the oral account given by the apostle to the author long before, this saying ceases to have any meaning; for there is no direct bond between such a testimony and the readers of the actual writing ; the " that ye may believe " has no longer -any justification. 200 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL • [BOOK III;.

.Finally, the two verbs in the present must be remarked: "He­ kno-weth" and " he saith true." What do they prove 1 That at the time when the lines were written, the witness of the facts was still living. And in that case what is gained by substituting for him as editor one of his disciples i The Gospel none the less remains a narrative composed under the eye and with the approbation of John himsclf.1 There is another passage, besides, which absolutely condemns. this meaning given by Reuss and many others to xix. 3 5 ; it is the analogous declaration xxi. 24. These men, occupying a well-known and respected position in the church, expressly affirm what those critics, resting on xix. 35, deny, namely the identity of the evangelist-editor with the apostle-witness: "That disciple (he whom Jesus loved) is he who bears witness (o µ,apTupwv) of these things, and who wrote them (o ,ypa,[ra~), and we know that his witness is true." It is true, Reuss maintains, that these men were mistaken, and that in good faith, some time after the death of John, they confounded the­ apostle with the editor. But those attestors, who were able to, furnish the Gospel with a postscript which is not wanting in a single manuscript or version, must have taken an active part in the publication of the writing; they must consequently have been its first depositaries. In such circumstances, how could an error on their part be possible ? Then, to express themselves as they do, they must have read the book which they themselves published, at least the passage xix. 35, for, according to Reuss, the author in these words declares exactly the opposite of what they solemnly affirm. Finally, when the two passages are compared, it must not be forgotten that the attestors of eh. xxi. say : we know, and not : he knoweth, as is said by the speaker in eh. xix. By the plural pronoun of the first person they distinguish themselves as precisely from the witness-apostle as by the singular pronoun of the third pernou, he knowetk, the editor of xix. 3 5 identifies himself with this witness. How, then, can Reuss say : " The sentence 1 Reuss is quite aware of this grave difficulty, and seeks to obviate it. Ha­ says that if the author has said : He knoweth, it is because the Greek language did not furnish him with a special term to say : He knew. But it was enough. for the author to write instead of .r;.,., he knoweth, p,,, he knew (he I.new whea he was alive); and does not the following verb, put also in the present: "that he saith true," confound so puerile an evasion ! CHAI'. II.] THE AUTHOR. 261 xxi. 24 occurs in another place in the body of the Gospel; the .analogy is obvious"? Yes, but the difference is not less so.1 Hilgenfeld saw clearly that it was impossible to find in xix. 3 5 a distinction deliberately established by the writer between himself and the witness. He holds therefore that the author, after wishing all through his work to pass himself -0ff as the Apostle John, forgot himself for a moment at the passage xix. 3 5, and let the cat out of the bag. This is the -only expedient left. But is it admissible 1 The reader will judge for himself. Anyhow, if it is so, we must give up speaking of the supreme ability of an author to whom it is thought possible to ascribe such an oversight.

XIV. Will it be necessary to stop at a last objection to which some critics appear to attach a certain value ? How, it is said, could a man have regarded Jesus as a Divine Being_ after having lived with Him familiarly for three years? But the conviction was formed in him only gradually. And pre­ cisely this everyday familiarity took away from it whatever of an overwhelming character it might have had for dogmatic reflection. The Apocalypse, that writing which in the so-called critical school is generally ascribed to the apostle, raises exactly the same problem. Jesus is represented in it as the first and the last; He is called in it the Holy and the True, just as Isaiah calls Jehovah; and yet it is attributed to the apostle. The recognition of the Messianic dignity of Jesus was a first step which softened the transition to the recognition of His divinity. Arrived at the end of this long review of all the objections raised by modern criticism against the unanimous tradition of the church, we may be allowed to point out a curious phenomenon, which is not without psychological value in judging of this discussion. ls it not surprising that every adversary of the authenticity sr,ems especially struck with some one of these fourteen objections, which strikes the other critics only faintly, and in comparison with which he ascribes to all the rest but slender importance ? We leave the reader to explain the fact which more than once has given us matter for thought.

1 Not to prolong this discussion, we postpone to the following article what WE have to say on the commencement of the First Epistle of John (1 John i. 1-4). 262 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. (BOOK UL

§ 3. THE INTERNAL EVIDENCE. In his introduction to the New Testament (§ 93), Credner· has summed up this evidence as follows : " If we possessed no historical data regarding the author of the fourth Gospel, we should none the less be led to a positive result by the in­ dications which the book itself supplies. The nature of the language, the freshness and dramatic vivacity of the narrative, the accuracy and precision of the descriptions, the peculiar manner in which the forerunner and the sons of Zebedee are spoken of, the love, the fervid tenderness of the author for the person of Jesus, the irresistible charm shed over the Gospel history presented from that ideal point of view, the philo­ sophical reflections with which this Gospel begins,-all leads us to the following result: the author of this work can only be a man born in Palestine, only an eye-witness of the ministry of Jesus, only an apostle, only the beloved apostle, can only be that John whom Jesus had bound to His person by the celestial charm of His teaching, that John who reposed on His bosom, who stood near the cross, and who, during his sojourn in a town like Ephesus, not only felt himself attracted by philosophical speculation, but even fitted himself to hold his place in the midst of those Greeks distinguished for their literary culture." We cannot do better than follow the course marked out in this admirable paragraph, in which we should like only to change the two terms: ideal and philosophical, which seem to us not to render the true shade. Taking this summary as a programme, we shall also start from the circumference and gradually approach the centre.

I. The author is a Christian of Jewish origin. This is proved by his style, which, without Hebraizing, nevertheless possesses the inward peculiarities of the Hebrew language (see p. 176). The same follows from the corrections which the author makes in the translation of the LXX. from the original Hebrew in a number of quotations. We think, with Westcott,1 that the fact is indisputable in the following three : vi 45 (Isa. 1 The Holy Bible. St. John, p. xiv. CHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR, 263

liv. 13), xiii. 18 (Ps. xli. 9), xix. 37 (Zech. xii. 10); and we shall add without hesitation xii. 4 0 (Isa. vi. 10). Not once, on the contrary, does the evangelist quote from the LXX. at variance with the Hebrew. The intimate harmony of the teaching of Jesus with the Mosaic law and with the prophets, His constant references to the types of Jewish history, the perfect communion of spirit · established between Abraham and J esus,-all these particulars are set forth with so much force, that it is impossible to avoid subscribing to the judgment of Weizsacker. Only a Jew, who amid the foreign surroundings in which he dwelt had preserved the heritage of his youth, could narrate in this fashion. The development of the author's personal faith certainly passed through these two normal phases of J udeo-Christian faith; the acknow ledgment of Jesus as the Messiah, and faith in Him as the Son of God. Compare, for the former of these two steps, the profession of faith made by the first disciples, i. 42 and 46, and for the second the whole sequel of the narrative. This progress is indicated in the words which sum up the Gospel (xx. 31): "That ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God." A last and thoroughly conclusive proof arises from the knowledge of Jewish usages which the author shows. He knows perfectly the Jewish feasts (the Passover, the feast of Tabernacles), and not only the greater, but also the less, which the law had not instituted, as that of Pnrim, v. 1 (see the commentary), and that of the Dedication, x. 22. He knows the addition of an eighth day to the feast of Tabernacles (vii. 37), and the prohibition of all medical treatment on the Sabbath (ix. 14); the Jewish opinions according to which the coming of the Messiah was to be preceded by that of Elias, and the Messiah to spring from a wholly obscure origin (i. 21, vii. 2 7). He is not ignorant either of the prevailing hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans, or the more spiritual character of the Messianic expectation among the latter (iv. 9 and 25, 26). The Jewish mode of embalming bodies, different from that of the Egyptians (xix. 40), the custom of tho ,Tews to purify themselves on entering their houses (ii. 6), th0 syna­ gogal excommunication (ix. 22), the custom of closing the sepLtlchral grottoes with large stones (xi. 38, xx. 1), the sale of 264 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III. animals and the exchange set up in the temple (ii. 14),-all these circumstances, many of them not mentioned in the Synoptics, are familiar to him. He knows the scruples felt by the Jews both about entering a heathen dwelling, and about leaving the bodies of the condemned publicly exposed beyond the day of execution (xviii. 28, xix. 31). He knows that a Rabbin does not engage in conversation with a woman (iv. 27); that the religious rulers of the nation treat with the most profound contempt that portion of the people who have not received rabbinical training (vii. 49); and finally, that in case of conflict between the law of the Sabbath and that of circumcision on the eighth day, the latter takes precedence of the former (vii. 22, 23).

II. This Jew did not live abroad; be was a Palestinian Jew. He speaks of the different places in the Holy Land as a man who knows them himself, and to whom all the topo­ graphical details of the country are familiar. He knows that there exist other places having the name of Cana and Bethsaida than those of which he speaks, and which he distinguishes by the epithet, of Galilee (ii. 1, xii. 21). He knows that Bethany is 15 furlongs distant from Jerusalem (xi. 18); that Ephraim is situated on the confines of the desert (xi. 54); that Enon is near Salim (iii. 2 3) ; that a distance of 2 5 to 3 0 furlongs is equal to nearly half the breadth of the Sea of Tiberias (vi. 19, comp. with Matt. xiv. 24) ; that it is easy to make the journey on foot round the northern end of that sea (vi. 5 and 22); that to go ·from Cana to Capernaum, one must descend (ii. 12) ; that it is necessary to cross the Cedron over a bridge to get from Jerusalem to the foot of the Mount of Olives (xviii. 1); that the pool of Siloam is quite near J eru­ salem (ix. 7) ; and that there are intermittent springs in the 1ieighbourhood of the temple (v. 7). He also knows the part of the temple where are the chests intended to receive the offerings (viii. 20), and Solomon's porch (x. 23). The picture of the entrance of the valley of Sichem in the scene of Jacob's well, c,rmld only have been drawn by a man who had gazed on Mount Gerizim, commanding the valley, and the magnifi­ cent fields of wheat which spread to the right in the plain of Mokhra. Renan dedares: "Only a Jew of Palestine who ()HAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 265

.had often passed the entrance of the valley of Sichem could have written that." The author is as well informed of the historical circum­ stances of the period in which the facts he describes fall He knows that the right of putting to death has been lately taken from the Jews (xviii. 31); he knows that at the time when Jesus makes His first appearance in the temple, the work of reconstructing that edifice has lasted aheady for forty-six years (ii. 20). He knows thoroughly the family relations and the relations of sympathy which unite the present high priest to the former, and the influence which the latter continues to exercise in the course of affairs (xviii. 13-28). Baur thought he had discovered in our Gospel a multitude of historical and geographical errors. This accusation is, at the present day, abandoned. "There is no reason," even Keim says (p. 13 3), " for believing in these alleged errors." Renan is copious on this view : " The too often repeated opinion, that our author knows neither Jerusalem nor Jewish matters, ·seems to me utterly destitute of foundation" (p. 522).1

III. We can prove by a multitude of particulars that this Palestinian Jew was a conternpomry of Jesus and a witness of His history ; let us add even, not to be unduly detailed and lengthy, an apostle. This appears from the multitude of minute details which abound in the narrative, which it is impossible to explain by a. dogmatical or philosophical idea, and which can be nothing else than the simple and almost involuntary expression of personal recollection. And first as to times and seasons : " It was about the tenth hour" (i. 40) ; " It was about the sixth hour" (iv. 6) ; " And He abode there two days" (iv. 40); "Yesterday at the seventh hour" (iv. 52); "It was winter," or "It was bad weather" (x. 2 2) ; "It was night" (xiii. 3 0) ; "Infirm thirty­ eight years" (v. 5).-As to the determination of places: The treasury of the temple (viii. 20); Solomon's porch (x. 23); Jesus remained outside the town (xi. 30).-As to numbers:

1 On the alleged mistakes imputed by Baur to the evangelist, see this Com­ mentary on the following passages: i. 28 (Bethany), iii. 23 (Enon/, iv. 5 J.Sycharr), xviii. 1 (Cedron), vii. 52, xi. 49, etc. 266 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III.

The six water-pots in the hall (ii. 6) ; the four soldiers (xix. 23); the hundred pounds of perfume (xix. 39); the· 200 cubits and the 153 fishes (xxi. 8 and 11).-One is introduced by all sorts of details into the inmost circle of Jesus and His apostles. The author refers to those most pleasant relations which Jesus maintained with them, with Philip for example (vi. 5-7); the interposition of Andrew (vv. 8, 9); the lad whose were the loaves; the indirect warning given to Judas (ver. 70); the name of this apostle's father (ver. 71); the blunt but generous declaration or Thomas (xi. 16) ; his incredulous exclamation and his cry of adoration (xx. 25, 28); the questions of Thomas, Philip, and Judas on the last evening (eh. xiv.) ; the decisive moment when the light finally broke on all of them, and when they proclaimed their faith (xvi. 30): the sudden invitation 0£ Jesus : " Rise, let us go hence " (xiv. 31 ). Such particulars­ as the following are also to be remarked : " They had lighted a fire of coals" ••. (xviii. 18) ; "The coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout" (xix, 23) ; " Having put the sponge round the hyssop" (xix. 29); "The servant's name was Malchus" (xviii 10), etc. etc. "So many precise traits,'

To all these details let us add the great scenes in which there is shown, as it were openly, the pencil of the eye­ witness : the account of the calling of the first disciples (eh. i.); of the sojourn in Samaria (iv.); of the private scenes connected with the resurrection of Lazarus and the feet­ washing (xi. and xiii.); finally, the incomparable sketch of Pilate's negotiations with the Jews (xviii. and xix.). If, after all these facts, there should remain any doubt as to our author's being an eye-witness, it would vanish before his own testimony, which no one now-a-days, neither W eiz­ sacker nor Reuss nor Sabatier, has the hardihood to charge with imposture, as the school of Baur did. That testimony is expressed in the three following passages : i. 14, xix. 35, and first Epistle i. 1-4. The author thus expresses himself, i. 14 : " And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory " . . . It is now alleged that the beholding referred to here is solely the inward view of faith, which is the posses­ sion of every Christian. Does not Paul say : "We with unveiled face behold the glory of the Lord" (2 Cor. iii. 18); and John himself: " Whosoever sinneth bath not seen Him" ? (1 John iii. 6). Thus Keim and Reuss.-True, there is a. spiritual beholding of ,T esus to which the passages refer; but these sayings are not found, in the Epistles from which they are taken, in connection with the description of the fact of the incarnation, as in the passage John i. 14: "The Word was made flesh . . ., it dwelt • • ., and we beheld" • . . At the head of a historical work which begins thus, and in which there is about to be related the earthly life of Jesus, such a declaration can have no other view than that of solemnly guaranteeing the narrative which is about to follow. It is impossible to confound such a context with that of an Epistle in which the author describes the spiritual state common to all Christians. The passage xix. 3 5 has already been studied. The identity of the author of the Gospel with the apostle, the witness of the crucifixion of Jesus, is there positively affirmed. This passage, objects Sabatier, is too like in character to that of the appendix (xxi. 24) to admit of our drawing any but the same conclusion from it. :Rut we have already shown 268 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. lBOOK III.

(p. 260) that the character of the two passages is, on the contrary, wholly different; in eh. xix. (he knoweth) the witness affirms his identity with the editor of the Gospel ; in eh. xxiv. (we know) the friends of the author and witness affirm his identity with the disciple whom Jesus loved ; thus each affirms essentially the same thing, but in a way suitable to his particular position and part.1 There exists a second writing, evidently from the same pen as the Gospel, and the author of which likewise declares him­ self a witness of the facts and an apostle, with a clearness which leaves nothing to be desired by any one who does not wish to close his eyes to the light. We read, 1 John i. 1 ff. : " That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life .. . declare we unto you, that ye may have fellowship with us ... ; and these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full; and this is the message which we have heard of Him and declare unto you" • • . How is it possible to deny, in view of such expressions, that the author intends to give himself out as an eye and ear witness of the facts of the Gospel history? Let any one tell us what more forcible terms he could have used to designate himself as such. Reuss says: "It is enough that Jesus lived the life of mortals to enable every believer to say, We have seen, heard, and touched Him." 2 Yes, but on condition that when he speaks thus, he does not expressly contrast himself with other believers who have neither seen, heard, nor touched, and to whom he therefore says: " We declare unto you . • . these things write we unto ymi, that ye also may have fellowship with us, and that your joy may be as complete as ours." Reuss says : " Every preacher who transmits the truth to a new generation will ever be able to express himself in the same way." The man who can tranquillize himself by such a subterfuge we leave in his happy quietude. We have evi­ dently here the same contrast as in John xx. 29, between those who have seen and those who shall believe without having

1 Sabatier's ten lines on this subject (Encycl. des Sc. reliq. p. 193) a.re to me ..n insoluble enigma beyond all discussion, 2 Theol. johann. p. 106. THE ALl'HOR. 269 seen; or, as in xix. 3 5, between him who has seen and you who shall believe. Sabatier has recourse to another expedient. He thinks he can explain the words by the author's desire "not to present a historical testimony, but to combat Docetism." There is nothing more in them, says he, than " the positive affirmation of the reality of the flesh of Jesus Christ" (p. 19 3). But, if it were so, what purpose would it serve to begin with the words : " That which was from the beginning," developed in ver. 2 by these : " And the life which was with the Father was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness of it" ?-The intention of the writer is obviously not to contrast the reality of the body of Jesus with the idea of a mere appearance, but to bring out these two facts which seem contradictory, and the union of which was of vital importance in his view ; on the one hand, the divine, eternal being of Christ; on the other, the perfect reality, not of His body only, but of His human existence. It is the same thought as that which is expressed in the saying which forms the theme of the Gospel : " The Word was made flesh.'' Besides, the Docetes did not deny the sensible appearances in our Lord's life, and the apostle would have made no way against them by affirming them. It therefore remains indisputable, with every one who is determined to take the texts for what they are, and not to make them say what he wishes, that the author expressly gives himself out in two of those texts, and that he is given out in the third by friends who know him personally, as a witness of the facts related in the book ; and if any one refuses to admit this double testimony, he cannot escape the necessity of making him an impostor. We take it well of the modern writers who, like Reuss and Sabatier, recoil from such a consequence ; but we think that it is not possible to do so except by sacrificing the exegetical conscience.

IV. If we seek, finally, to designate this apostle, at once a witness and historian of the Gospel facts, we are forced to recognise in him the disciple whom Jesus loved, John himself. A.nd first: the disciple whom Jesus loved. The author declares, xix. 35, that he is the man who with 270 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IIL his mm eyes saw two prophecies fulfilled at the same time by the spear-thrust of the Gentile soldier. Now his narrative mentions only one apostle present at our Lord's crucifixion­ the apostle whom Jesus loved (ver. 26). It is evident, therefore, that he gives himself out as that disciple.-We have already called attention to the sketch of the manner in which the disciple whom Jesus loved arrived at faith in the resurrection (xx. 8 and 9). The absolutely autobiographical character of that account leaves no doubt as to the identity of that disciple with the author.-The same holds of the intimate and wholly personal details which are given regarding the relation of Peter to him at the last Supper (xiii. 24-27), and of the account of their last conversation with Jesus after His appear­ ing in Galilee (xxi. 19-22).-Let us add, that no one more than the disciple whom Jesus loved was under obligation to rectify the tenor of a saying which concerned him, and which circulated in a form fitted to compromise the dignity of Jesus. We say further : John, the son of Zebedee. In all the apostolical catalogues John and James ara named in the first rank after Simon Peter, and this place, which is constantly assigned them, is justified by the par• ticular distinctions which they shared with that apostle. How does it happen that in the fourth Gospel, in the only case in which the sons of Zebedee are mentioned (xxi. 2), they are placed last of the .five apostles mentioned, and so after Thomas and Nathanael? This circumstance is inexplicable, unless the author of the account is himself one of those tv,o brothers. In the Synoptics, the forerunner of Jesus is constantly calleu John, the Baptist ; this was the title conferred on him not only by Christian, but also by Jewish tradition, as we see in Josephus (Antiq. xviii. 5. 2): "John, surnamed Baptist, whom Herod had executed." In our Gospel, on the contrary, he is always called John and nothing more. One would naturally conclude therefrom that the author of the narrative had be­ come acquainted with the forerunner before fame had added the title Baptist to his name as an inseparable epithet, consequently from the beginning of his public activity. Then, if there are reasons for holding that the author himself bore the name of John, it is the more easily understood why he did not feel -OHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 271 the need of givmg to the forerunner a title fitted to dis­ tinguish him from some other John equally well known in the church. For the idea of a confusion between him and the bearer of his name must have been, as Hase says, "wholly remote from his consciousness."-Finally, their remains .a decisive circumstance-it is the absence from the book of all mention both of John's own name and of those of the -other members of his family. His mother, Salome, who in the Synoptics is mentioned among the women standing by the -cross of Jesus (Matt. xxvii. 56; Mark xvi. 1), is not named here in the parallel enumeration (John xix. 25). No more is James in the scene of the calling of the first disciples {eh. i.), where, however, a slight touch, full of delicacy, betrays his presence.1 This style is absolutely different from .that of forgers. "The latter," says Reuss, "seek above all .to emphasize the names which are to serve as their passport." 2 This complete and thoroughgoing omission, from one end of the book to the other, of the names of three persons who -occupied one of the foremost places in the surroundings of Jesus, leaves no room for doubt that the author was par­ ticularly related to all three. We cannot deny ourselves the pleasure, as we close, of quoting here a beautiful paragraph from Hase (p. 48): "While the Apostle John is nowhere named, there passes across the whole Gospel an unknown and, as it were, veiled figure, which sometimes stands out, but without the veil ever r1smg. It is impossible to believe that the author did not himself know who the disciple was whom Jesus loved; who, at the last feast, reclined on His bosom; who, with Peter, followed the Master when made prisoner; to whom the latter bequeathed His mother; and who, running with Peter, arrived first at the -tomb. There must therefore have existed between the author and this personage a particular relation, and- a reason, personal to himself, for not naming him. How natural to think that he designated himself by this periphrasis, which embraced the sublimest experience and the entire happiness of his existence!"

1 Ch. i. 42 : " Andrnw first finds his own brother Simon." This stra1,ge form can only be explained by the understood idea that the other disciJJle also ,songht his brother, but did not find him till later • TMol. johann. p. 100, 272 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK m...

§ 4. THE CONTRARY HYPOTHESES. We shall only deal here with those hypotheses which have· a serious character. We therefore set aside, without discussion, such fancies as those of Tobler and Liitzelberger, who ascribe our Gospel, the former to Apollos, the latter to a Samaritan who emigrated to Edessa, in Mesopotamia, about 13 5. We meet, in the first place, with " the great unknown " of Baur and his school, who is said to have written a romance of the Logos a little before or after the middle of the second century; the­ man whom Keim calls "the most brilliant :flower that followed the age of the apostles."-One thing strikes the mind in this hypothesis at the first glance : I mean the very title unknown, which men are obliged to give to the author of such a work. Every one knows the mediocrity of the personages and writers of the second century compared with those of the first. To the epoch of creative production there succeeded one of pale reproduction. What is that Epistle of Clement of Rome to which Eusebius awards the epithets great and marvelloits ( lmu-ro"Jl.1] µ,erya"Jl.'1] -re ,cal; 0avµ,aula) 1 A good pious letter, such as an ordinary Christian of our day would write. Polycarp and Papias are not in a.ny way superior to Clement Ignatius surpasses them in originality; but what strangeness and eccentricity! Herma_s is of the most killing dulness. The Epistle to Diognetus has a certain distinction in a literary point of view ; but as to the thoughts, and even as to all that is most striking in exposition, it rests absolutely on the Epistles of Paul and the fourth Gospel. If we take away what is borrowed from these apostolical writings, it falls back into the general mediocrity. And in the midst of this period of effeteness there arises a solitary man, whose writings have­ so original a character that they form a class completely by themselves in the entire collection of Christian, and even human literature ; this man does not live as a hermit; he takes, according to Baur, an active part in the controversies of his time; he pronounces the word of pacification in all the· questions which agitate it; in an incomparable work he lays the foundation of Christianity, and of the wisdom of future· ages.-And this man, this "flower of his age," no one­ has seen flourish ; the church, the witness of his life and CHAP. II.] THE AUTHOR. 273 labours, has forgotten even to the slightest trace of his existence. No one can tell where this extraordinary star rose and set. Verily, a strange story! It is said, no doubt: And the author of the Book of Job and of the Epistle to the Hebrews, are not they also great unknowns 1 We answer: The remote antiquity from which the first of these writings proceeds is buried, so far as we are concerned, in profound darkness ; how different from that second century of the church, regarding which we have such copious and detailed information! The Epistle to the Hebrews is but a simple theological treatise, an important and original writing no doubt; but how different from a work containing a history, in many respects a new history, of Jesus, that subject of supreme importance in the eyes of the church ! The author of the one is lost among the splendours of the apostolic age; while the author of the other might be expected to shine like a star of the first magnitude in the ill-lighted sky of the second century. Let us add, that at that period, when the portrait of J esu,, was fixed by three accounts universally spread and already distinguished from every other writing of the same kind, a pseudo-John would have taken good care not to compromise the success of his fraud by diverging from the generally received history of Jesus. Renan rightly says: "A forger, writing about the year 120 or 130 [how much more at the date of 130-160 !] an imaginary Gospel, would have contented himself with treating the received version after his own idea, as is the case in the apocryphal Gospels, and would not have overturned from the foundation what were regarded as the essential lines in the life of Jesus." 1 Or, as Weizsacker also observes : ".An author who wrote this Gospel in order to introduce certain ideas into the church, would never have ventured to invent a historical basis so different from that presented by the prevailing traditions." 2 The author who.

1 Vie de Jesus, 13th ed. pp. lxxv., lxxvi. • Jahrb. fur D. Theol. 1859, p. 698. Reuss says to the same effect: "Is it credible that a forger, if he had wished to pass for one of the first disciples, would have ventured to depart so often from the synoptic accounts in regard to generally known facts, at the risk of immediately seeing his own charged with errors and falsehoods!" The circumstance mentioned here is so manifest that even de Wette was strnck with it : "A final critical sentence which deniM to John all participation in this work, has against it not only the odious• GODET I. S JOilN. 274 THR ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK Ill with the supreme authority of a master, modified, corrected, and completed the synoptical narrative, could not be a mere unknown; he must ham felt himself to be an acknowledged master of this field, and certain of finding credit for his history within the church. Hase, moreover, justly points out that a writer remote from the facts, and desirous of offering a delineation of the person of the Logos, to men of his time, would not have failed in this fictitious description to reduce the human to a minimum, and to trace the purely marvellous history of a God, allowing Him merely a terrestrial form; while the fourth Gospel presents us with precisely the opposite phenomenon : "Everywhere in Jesus the fullest and most tender humanity; everywhere, under the golden breastplate of the Logos, the beating of a true man's heart, whether in joy or in sorrow." 1 Hilgenfeld thinks that the unknown author, in composing such a work, wished to bring Lack the churches of Asia from the Judaizing Christianity of the Apostle John to the pure spirituality of St. Paul, originally established in these churches. Ordinarily, the procedure of forgers is justified by saying that they make the alleged author speak as they think he would have spoken in the circumstances in which they themselves live. Thus it is that Keim excuses the pseudo-John: "Our author has written in the just conviction that John would have written in a precisely similar manner had he still been alive in his time." Let our two critics agree if they can l According to the latter, the author sets himself to continue the Johanniue work in Asia; according to the former, he strives to overturn it, and that by borrowing the mask of John himself! This second stage of the pious fraud comes very near the impious fraud. The expedient of the pious fraud has been singularly abused in these last times, as if this form had been admitted without repugnance by the conscience of the church itself. That it was frequently employed is proved by facts beyond denial; but that the church ever assented to it

ness of suprosing a forgery, but also the improbability that Christian antiquity would have accepted a Gospel which diverged on points of such importance from the Gospel tradition, without feeling assured and tram1uillized by its apostolical allthority."-(Einl. § 110 g.) 1 Oesch. Jesu, p. 47. -CHAP. 11.] THE AUTHOR. 275 is what the facts quite as positively contradict. The author of the well-known book, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, found it vain to allege that he had composed the little work with a -good intention, and in love to the Apostle Paul (id se amore Pauli fecisse); he was nevertheless obliged, after confessing his fault, to retire from his office as presbyter (convictum atque conjessum loco decessisse). This is what passed, according to Tertullian's account, in a church of Asia Minor in the second century.1 And yet the whole matter in question in this book was an innocent anecdote, of which Paul was the hero; while in the case of the fourth Gospel, the romance would be nothing less than a fictitious history of the person of the Lord l This mysterious X of Tiibingen criticism is in fact only an imaginary quantity. The instant we stand face to face with the world of realities, it is seen that this great unknown is no other than a great misknown-Jolm himself. It was needful, therefore, to make trial of a name. Nicolas proposed the Presbyter John, and by this personage Renan seems now disposed to hold. 2 But this hypothesis raises difficulties not less serious than the former. First of all, it is impossible to believe that such a man, the immediate disciple of Jesus and contemporary of John, would have sought to pass himself off for this apostle, by expressing him­ self as he makes the author do in the passage xix. 35. Moreover, with what other intention than that of disguising himself could he have so carefully effaced from his narrative the names of that apostle, of his brother, and of his mother? Can such a part be attributed to the aged disciple of the Lord ? :Finally, this pious presbyter can only have been a second-rate man. Papias, in the enumeration of his authorities, a~signs him the last place, even after .A.ristion. Polycrates, in his letter to Victor, where he refers to all the eminent men who have adorned the church of Asia, the .Apostles Philip and John, Poly carp of Smyrna, Thraseas of Eumenia, Saga:is of Laoclicea, Melito of Sardis, makes no mention of this person­ age. " So," says Sabatier rightly (p. 19 5), "he must be left in the shade and in the secondary rank where the documents put him. He is of no use in resolving the Johannine ,question." 1 Tertullian, de Baptismo. 1 L'Egli,., chretienne, 1879. 276 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III.

And what do Reuss, Sabatier, Weizsacker, an

-0nly be explained if the author and the witness are one arn.l the same person. We conclude by saying with B. Weiss, that every hypothesis -contrary to the authenticity is exploded by encountering still greater difficulties than the traditional opinion. Keim says proudly : " Our age has annulled the judgment of the ages." But is the school of Baur "our age"? And were it so, no age is infallible. It is enough to have one infallibility proclaimed in our day, without adding one of the left to that of the right.

CHAPTER III.

THE PLACE OF COMPOSITION.

If John is really the author of the Gospel, and if he finished the second part of his apostleship in .Asia Minor, nothing is more probable than that this Gospel was composed at Ephesus. Such is the unanimous tradition of the primitive church (see pp. 46-49); and here it is certainly that we can best imagine the birth of such a work. .A multitude -0f particulars prevents us from thinking that it was composed for Palestinian readers. What need to translate for former .Tews Hebrew terms such as Rabbi, Messiah, and Siloam, to signalize the term Bethesda as a Hebrew name, and to explain Jewish usages (i. 39, 42, iv. 25, v. 2, ix. 7, ii. 6, xix. 40 €tc.) '? Other particulars naturally direct our thought to a Greek country : first the language, then the satisfaction with which the author describes certain traits in the ministry of Jesus which refer to the Greeks, such as the fronical question of the Jews : " Will he go unto the dispersed among the Greeks'?" (vii. 35), or the request of those Greeks who, shortly before the Passion, desired to converse with Jesus (xii. 20). It was amid Hellenic surroundings that such memories had their full appropriateness. But there were Greek churches elsewhere than in Asia Minor; so several critics have thought of other countries : Wittichen, of Syria; Baur, of Egypt. "\\Tell ! even mdependently of tradition, we think then:. would still be ground to decide in favour of Asia 278 THE OltIGJN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK III.

Minor. This country, says Renan, "was at that period the theatre of a strange movement of syncretic philosophy. All the germs of Gnosticism already existP-d there." We have thus no difficulty in understanding the use of the term Logos, which forms an allusion to the discussions probably raised in such a theological and religious centre. Besides, is it not in this country very particularly that the influence of the J obannine Gospel makes itself felt all through the seconcl century 1 And is not the heresy against which the First Epistle of John seems to be especially directed, that of Cerinthus, who taught at Ephesus during the last years of the apostle's life? Let us add that it is to the churches of Asia Minor that St. Paul addressed those Epistles which treat the subject of Christ's person absolutely from the same point of view as the fourth Gospel; we mean the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians. It was in those countries, un­ doubtedly, that human speculations tended to lower the dignity of Christ, and that the churches had most need to be enlightened on this subject. These indications seem to us sufficient, and even deci,ive.

CHAPTER IV.

THE OCCASION AND AIM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL.

Tradition is not so unanimous on this point as on those preceding. The accounts of the Fathers are at one, no doubt, in declaring that if John decided to write, it was only at the instance of those who smrounded him. In the Fragment of Muratori it is said that " John was exhorted to write by his fellow-disciples and by the bishops." Clement of Alexandria relates that he did so at the instigation of the notables, and under the inspiration of the Spirit.1 Eusebins expresses himself thus : " The apostle, urged, it is said, l,y his friends, wrote the things which the first evangelists had omitted." 2 Finally, Jerome narrates, in his emphatic style, that he was constrained by almost all the bishops of Asia, and

1 Ilp•"''"'"'"'"" ~,,. ,.;;;, 'Y""f'I'"'', """I'"'" ~ .. IP•p~di,,,.,,, (Eusebins, H. E. vi. 14). 2 II. E. iii. 24. CHAP. lV.] THE OCCASION AND AIM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 2 7 9 by deputations from numerous churches, to write something more profound respecting the divinity of the Saviour, and to mount to the very Word of God.1 This circmnstar,e,e, attested in so many ways, is interesting as agreeing with what we know of the essentially receptive character and of the absence of outward initiative which distinguished the Apostle John. But the foreign impulse which led him to take pen in hand, must have been itself called forth by some external circumstance; and the following is what naturally suggests itself. John had long taught in those churches viva voce. When the Synoptics reached those countries, his hearers remarked and appreciated the differences which distinguished the accounts of their apostle from those other narratives; and it was the impression produced by this discovery which no doubt led to the solicitations which were thenceforth addressed to him. This explanation is confirmed by the testimony of Clement. "John, the last survivor, seeing that external (corporeal) things had been described in the Gospels (the Synoptics), at the instance of the leading men, wrote a spiritual Gospel." Eusebius also says that when Matthew, Mark, and Luke had each published their Gospel: "Those writings having come into the hands of all, and into those of John, the latter approved of them . • . and that urged by his friends, he wrote" . . . (see above). These friends of J ohu who induced him to write were, no doubt, the depositaries of his book, and the men who charged themselves with its publication; and it was they also who, in discharge of this task, furnished it with the postscript which accompanied it into all the world, and which has come down to us (xxi. 24). But what aim did the apostle particularly set before him in acceding to this desire ? It is here that ancient and modern writers differ. The author of the Fragment of Muratori seems to admit no other intention on the part of the evangelist than that of instructing and edifying the church. John had, according to him, the task of relating ; the other apostles present (Philip, Andrew ?), that of checking. These expressions suppose a purely histol"ieal and practical aim. Yet, if the synoptical Gospels were already in the hands both of the author and his readers, the new narrative co 1lld 1 Gommeut. in .Matt. iv .• De vii'. dla.str. c. 9. 280 TlIE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK Ill uot possibly fail to be intended to complete, or in certain respects to correct, the older narratives. Otherwise, what purpose would it serve to compose a new one ? So several :Fathers do not hesitate to state this second aim, which is closely connected with the first. Eusebius declares that the apostle wrote the things omitted by the first evangelists, and very specially that he repaired the omission of what Jesus had done at the beginning of His ministry; then he adds that "if Matthew and Luke have preserved to us the genealogy of Christ according to the flesh (ryevea)l.oryta), John has taken His divinity (0EOAoryfa) as his point of departure." "It was," he adds, " the part which the Divine Spirit bad reserved for him, as the most excellent of all" (John iii 24). Clement of Alexandria gives a very high and purely spiritual scope to John's intention of completing the Synoptics: "As corporeal things were described in the Gospels, he was solicited to write a spiritual Gospel," that is to say, one fitted to expound, by means of the discourses of Jesus preserved in it, the spirit of the facts recorded by the Synoptics. To this historico-didactic aim, some Fathers add the intention of combating various errors which began to make way in the end of the first century. This polemical aim is attributed by Iremeus, if not to the whole Gospel, as is often said, at least to the prologue: "John, the disciple of the Lord, wishing to root out the seed which had been scattered in the heart of men by Cerinthus, and previously by the Nicolaitans ... and to lay down the rule of truth in the church, commenced thus" (iii. 11. 1 ). Jerome expresses himself nearly to the same effect: '' As John was in Asia, and the seed sown by heretics, such as Cerinthus, Ebion, and others, who deny that Christ is come in the flesh, was already sprouting, . . . he replied to the brethren who solicited him that he would write, if all fasted and prayed to God with him; which they did. After which, the revelation with which he was filled burst forth in this prologue: ' In the beginning was the Word'" ( ibid.). Several moderns have adhered to these suppositions, or added new ones. Erasmus, Grotius, Hengstenberg hold to the idea of a polemic against Oerinthus. Lessing, de Wette, and others think, with Jerome, that the author was specially aiming at the .Ebionites. Semler, Schneckenburger, Ebrard think that -OHAP. IV.] THE OCCASION AND AIM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 281

he had the IJocetm in view ; Grotius, Storr, Ewald : the disciple!J -of John the Baptist. Finally, the modern school, rejecting with a sort of disdain -the various aims which we have indicated, and thinking to rise to a higher conception of our Gospel, attributes to it a purely speculative aim.1 Lessing had already declared that John had saved Christianity-which but for him would have disappeared as a Jewish sect-by teaching a higher conception of Christ's person.2 Whence had he taken this new notion of the Christ ? Lessing did not explain himself on this point, no doubt prudentially. Modern criticism has undertaken to give the answer in his place. Liicke thinks that John proposed to raise the simple faith of the church, threatened with the double heresy of Ebionism and Gnosticism, to the state of Gnosis or higher knowledge. Reuss attributes no other aim to the author of this work than that of publishing his own " evangelical theology founded on the idea of the Saviour's divinity" (p. 2 9). Hilgenfeld, as we have seen, holds that the pseudo-John wrote that he might set up again in Asia Minor the standard of Paulinism which had been overthrown and supplanted by the J udeo-Christianity of ,John. According to Baur, everything is fictitious, except a few synoptic materials, in the writing meant to resolve all the burning questions of the second century, apparently without touching them. The author accredits Gnosis in the church by introducing into it the theory of the Logos; he moderates Montanist exaltation; he resolves the question of Easter at the expense of the churches of Asia, but in the sense of the other churches ; he reconciles the two parties, the Pauline and the J udeo-Christian, and finally succeeds in founding that one and universal church after which Christianity aspired from its origin; he consummates the apostolic work Our task is to examine these various conceptions, and to discover what of truth or error each of them may contain. Our Gospels, all four, propose one single aim, to produce and strengthen faith by presenting to it historically its -supreme object, Jesus Christ. But each of them does so in

1 Keim: "The evangelist is indeed much too great to follow the histo1foal

airu.. H ' Neiie Hypothese iiber die vier Evan~elisten, ed. Lachmann, t. xi. 282 THE OHIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IH~ its own way, that is to say, each one presents this object to­ the church in a different aspect. Matthew demonstrates, with a view to the Jews, and by means of the harmony between the history and prophecy. Luke expounds, by exhibiting to­ the Gentiles the treasures of universal divine grace. Mark depicts, making the Wonderful One live again as He was heheld by witnesses. If John relates, it is as little merely to relate. Exactly like the others, he relates in order to­ strengthen the faith of the church, first in the Messiahship, then in the divinity of Jesus. Such is his declaration in the often-quoted passage xx. 30, 31, where he gives his own explanation regarding the aim of his book : to show in J esu& the Messiah (the Christ) first, then the Son of God, that every one may find in Him eternal life. This declaration indicates nothing else than that historical and practical aim which the author of the Fragment of Muratori implicitly ascribes to our Gospel; and its contents· are fully confirmed by the contents of the book itself. How does the author, in fact, take to his task ? He relates the history of the development of his own faith, and of that of the other apostles, from the day when the two disciples of' John the Baptist recognised Jesus as the Christ (eh. i.), till that day on which Thomas worshipped Him as his Lord and his God (eh. xx.). These are the point of departure and the point of arrival. The narrative embraced between these two limits serves only to guide from the one to the other; and this fact alone suffices to enlighten us as to its aim. John wishes to make his readers repeat the course which his own faith traversed in the company of Jesus ; he wishE:s by the whole series of the facts and doctrines which enlightened himself to enlighten the church ; he wishes to glorify in her eyes the divine object of her faith by the same means as those by which Jesus was glorified in His own: the beholding and hearing of the "\V ord made flesh. When we express our­ selves thus, we only paraphrase the words of John himself in tbe beginning of his first Epistle (i. 1-4), and annotate the­ expression : in presence of His disciples, in the passage of the­ Gospel in which he explains his aim (xx. 30). But from. the very fact that the history traced by him was, already given in three writings which he possessed, and which. CHAP. IY.J THE OCCASION AND AIM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 283 his readers possessed, he puts himself inevitably into connec­ t.ion with those previous works. And hence it is he dismisses the thought of relating the facts in their totality, as if his publication were the first or only one. In the declaration, xx. 3 0, 31, he expressly reminds his readers of the fact that " Jesus did many other things in presence of His disciples which are not written in this book." It is also natural, consequently, that where he finds blanks in those writings which seem to him of some importance, he should seek to fill them up, or that if some facts do not seem to him to be presented with perfect clearness, he should seek to present them in their true light. As we have said, John certainly did not write to complete, but he often did complete or rectify in passing, and without losing sight of his aim: to dispby the terrestrial glory of the Son of God to the view of faith. Hence it is that he omits the Galilean ministry, fully described liy his predecessors, and dwells particularly on the residences at Jerusalem, in which the glory of the Lord had shone forth in a way which made an ineffaceable impression on his heart, in the conflict with the powers of darkness concentrated in that place. The intention of completing the previous narra­ tives, both historically considered, as Eusebius thought, and from a more spiritual point of view, as Clement of Alexandria asserted, is therefore perfectly well founded in fact; we set it down as a secondary aim, or, to speak more correctly, as a means subservient to the principal aim. Reuss thinks that this combination of certain secondary aims with the principal one "goes only to betray the weakness of those hypotheses." But is there a single historical work in existence which really follows only one aim, and which does not now and again take the liberty of working to some secondary result 1 Thiers assuredly did not write the history of the Consulate and of the Empire with the view of completing previous narratives. But will he refuse now and again to give special prominence to facts which his predecessors may have omitted, or to rectify those which in his view have been given inaccurately or incompletely ? It is not therefore as " a slave of the most vulgar patristic tradition " that 1 we maintain, as Reuss says, "l:!O poor a thesis." It is 1 Hilltoire de la tkeol. ckreti~nne, ii p. 312. 284 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTB. GOSPEL. [BOOK III. because of the facts, undeniable facts, to which even Reuss in his last work has found himself forced at length to open his eyes,1 that we continue to maintain this view. We persist even in a third opinion, not less opposed to the views of this critic. We maintain the truth, within certaiu limits, of the polem.ical aim ascribed to our Gospel by many Fathers, and by a goodly number of modern critics. The First Epistle of John incontestably proves that the author of our Gospel lived amid surroundings where already not a few false doctrines had sprung up within the church. We are perfectly at one with Keim and many others in recognising that the principal heresy combated in that Epistle was that of Oerinthus, known to the Fathers as the adversary of John at Ephesus. He taught that the true Christ, the Son of God, was not at all that poor Jew the son of Joseph, called Jesus, who died on the cross, but a heavenly Being who descended on Him at His baptism, and adopted Him temporarily as His organ, but who left Him to reascend to heaven before the Passion. Nothing better accounts than this doctrine for the polemic of 1 John ii. 22: "Who is a liar save him that denieth that Jesus is the Christ 1" Comp. also eh. iv. 1-3. Now can it be denied that the central word of our Gospel: " The Word was made flesh," cuts right at this error by affirming, in the fact of the incarnation, the organic and permanent union of divinity and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ ?-The same saying set aside, on the one hand, the ordinary heresy of the Ebionites, who, without falling into the subtilties of Cerinthus, simply denied the divinity of the Christ ; and, on the other, the Gnostic error, already existing perhaps in some minds, of a divine Christ who had taken nothing of humanity but the appearance. John thus placed a rock in the midst of the church against which the waves of the most opposite false doctrines must be broken. It was an indirect polemic, the only one suited to a historical work, but which was completed and defined by the more direct polemic of the Epistle. Neither does this Epistle of John allow us to overlook in certain passages of the Gospel the intention of refuting the pretrnsions of John the Baptist's disciples, who from the first 1 See the note quoted p. 95. CHAP. IV.] THE OCCASION AND AIM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 285 had taken their place among the adversaries of the Lord. When the apostle says, 1 Ep. v. 6 : " He, Jesus the Christ, is He who came with water and blood, not with water only, but with water and blood," is it not indisputable that he means to set aside the pretended Messiabship of John the Baptist, whom his disciples declared to be the Christ, though He had offered to the world only the symbolical purification of water-baptism, and not real purification by the blood of expiation 1 If, from this evidently polemical passage, we return to these declarations of the Gospel : " He [John] was not that light; but he came to bear witness to the light" (i. 8) ; "Who art thou ? And he confessed, and denied not ; but confessed, I am not the Christ " (i. 19, 2 0) ; " And his disciples came to him and said, Behold, He to whom thou barest witness baptizeth ! ... John answered, Ye are my witnesses that I said unto you, I am not the Christ" (iii. 2 6-28),-we shall be obliged to yield to the evidence, and to acknowledge that John in these sayings and narratives had in view former disciples of the forerunner, who, influenced by jealous hatred of Christ and the gospel, went the length of declaring their old master to be the Messiah.1 The polemical aim, as a secondary one, seems to us there­ fore justified by facts. And what more natural indeed ? When one establishes a truth, especially a truth of the first importance, he establishes it, no doubt, by itself, and in con­ sideration of its intrinsic worth ; but not without desiring, at the same time, to set aside the errors which might supplant it or paralyse its beneficent effects. There is only one aim, among those which have been mentioned, which we found ourselves forced to exclude absolutely; it is - we repeat it to the great scandal of Reuss-the speculative aim, the only one which this critic admits. Let us explain. In the view of Reuss and many others, the fourth Gospel is intended to assert in the church a new theory regarding the person of Jesus, which the author 1 Apollos (Acts xviii.) and the twelve disciples of John (Aets xix.) certain])' did not go so far. But it is not merely the circumstance related John iii. 25 ff. which shows us the secret hatred of a part of John's disciples to Jesus; there are also facts related by the Synoptics ; comp. Matt. ix. 14 and parall., and perhaps even xi. 2 ff., for the discipleB must by their repmts have provolted thii;, step taken by John. 286 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IIL had formed personally by identifying Christ with the divine Logos with which the Alexandrine philosophy had made him acquainted. We have shown that the facts, when seriously investigated, are not in harmony with this view, which, besides, gives the lie to the author's own declaration (xx. 3 0, 31 ). For in this passage he does not speak of his intention to raise faith to the state of speculative knowledge, but. simply of his desire to strengthen faith itself, by pre­ senting to it its object, Jesus the Messiah and the Son of God, in His fulness, and agreeably to all the signs in which He had displayed His unparalleled glory in his presence and that of his fellow-dispiples. There is no place in such a programme for a Christ who should be only the fruit of the evangelist's metaphysical speculations. Never, besides, in our Gospel is faith anything else than the assimilation of testi­ mony (i. 7) ; and testimony relates to a historical fact, not to an idea. It is possible, indeed, to imagine Thiers writing the history of Napoleon with the intention of displaying the greatness of his hero ; it is possible also to imagine him now and again completing and correcting the narratives anterior to his own, or even indirectly justifying the political and financial measures of the great monarch, by allusions to false theories in circulation on those questions. But what the historian would certainly never have done would have been to make use of his hero's person as a mouthpiece to spread over the world any theory whatever which belonged to him­ self, and with this view to ascribe to him acts which be had never done, or discourses which he had never delivered.1

1 In my fast edition I expressed myself thus: "The only aim positively excluded by that which we have just deduced from the declaration of the author (xx. 30, 31) is the speculative or didactic aim, the intention of satisfying the understanding by giving Christian dogma a new development." Rema quotes this sentence, suppressing the words: "the intention of sntisf'ling the urule:rstnnding." Now these omitted words are precisely those which explained what I here understood by didactic aim. It is perfectly clear that in l'eiatiug John proposed to teach; the only question is, whether this instructive narrative was intended to strengthen faith, as he himself asserts, aml as I also assert, or w1.s composed with the view of sati~fi1ing the understanding. To suppress these last words is to render my thought doubtful and absurd. In my second edition, to avoid all ambiguity, I wholly supprnssed the term didactic in this sense, and said: "The only excluded aim , • , is the philosophic or speculative aim" (i. p 294). ,CHAP. IV.] THE OCCASION A '1l AIM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 2 8?

To confirm the theological and speculative aim attributed by him to our Gospel, Reuss asks " if it was not this book which served as a basis and point of departure for the formulas of Nice and Chalcedon" (p. 3 3 ).-I answer, No ; for the subject of those formulas was not the texts of John. It was the fact of the incarnation itself, the union of the divine and human in the person of Christ regarding the mode -0f which it was sought to reach an understanding. Now this fact is not taught only in the fourth Gospel. It was taught, .as we have seen, in the Epistles of St. Paul (Col. i. ; Phil. ii. ; 1 Cor. viii. and x., etc.), in the Epistle to the Hebrews {eh. i. and ii.), in the Apocalypse, even in the Synoptics. The J obannine Gospel discovered the expression which best sets in relief the union of the divine and human in Christ ; but this union itself forms the basis of all the writings of the New Testament. It was not therefore the fourth Gospel, it was the Christian fact which obliged the Fathers of Nice and Chalcedon to seek formulas fitted to give account of this contrast which forms the supreme greatness of Christianity, while it is its greatest mystery.1 I have pleasure in closing the discussion of this subject with the following lines from B. Weiss, in which I find my view fully stated: "To expound the glory of the divine Logos as he had beheld it in the earthly life of Jesus (i. 14), as it had become more and more grandly revealed in conflict with unbelieving and hostile Judaism, and as it had led receptive souls to an ever firmer faith and an ever happer contempla­ tion,-such is the wish of the evangelist. This fundamental idea of the narrative does not in the least impair its histo­ rical character, because it was derived from the facts them­ selves through which the author lived, and because he confines himself to pointing out its realization in history." »

1 We do not return here to the aims set forth by Baur and Hilgenfeld. We think that the remarks, pp. 272-274, may suffice. 2 Introduction to the Gommentaiy on John's Gospel, p. 41. Among recent hypJtheses we may further note, as particularly curious, the system set forth by Noack in his work, Aus der Jordan- Wiege nach Golgotha, 1870: Jesus, the son of 1\Iary and a Samaritan soldier, came, in very consequence of that dis­ creditable birth, to regard God as his Father. Ha lived in a constant state of ecstasy, which he maintained by artificial means, fasting for instance. After having kept himself at that artificial elevation till he could do so no longer, he 288 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK Ill.

Shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem, the Apostle· John, set free from all duty to his own people, came and settled in Asia Minor. There flourished the magnificent churches planted by the labours of the Apostle Paul. But the prophecy of that same apostle: " I know that after my departure shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock" (Acts xx. 29), began to be fulfilled. An apostolic hand was needed to direct those churches. Round about Ephesus there stretched the fairest field for Christian work. We have already said with a great writer: "The church's centre of gravity was no longer at Jerusalem ; it was not yet at Rome ; it was at Ephesus." Moreover, this­ city was not only the great commercial mart between Asia and Europe, but also the meeting-place of a rich and active intellectual exchange between the religious and philosophical movements of the East and the culture of the West. It wa& the resort of the orators of every school, of the partisans of every system. On such a theatre, the Palestinian apostle must have grown, daily, not certainly in the knowledge of the person and work of Jesus, but in acquaintance with the manifold relations,. sympathetic or hostile, between the Gospel and the various tendencies of human wisdom. Those Christian populations. to whom St. Paul had opened the way of salvation by instruct­ ing them in the contrast between the state of sin and that of grace, and by showing them the means of passing from the one to the other, John now introduced to the full knowledge of the Saviour's person; he spread out before their view a great number of salient facts which, for one reason or another, tradition had left in the shade, many sublime lessons which had been profoundly impressed on his heart, and which he alone had preserved ; he described the relations, so full of love and condescension, which the Lord had maintained with His own, and the proofs which He had given them in this inti-

sought for death; and the person who assisted him to realize that wish, and so became the accessary to this final act in his life, was-J lHlas. He it is who­ was the discip[e whom Jesus loved, it is he who was the author of the fourth Gospel, which underwent a transformation at a later period, but the primitive· meaning of which was restored by Noack. Jesus died on Gerizim, whither he had withdrawn with his seven disciples, and where, with the help of Juda~,. i,e fell into the hands of his enemies, and was set free from life. CHAP. IV.] THE OCCASION AND AIM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 289 mate communion of His divine greatness and His filial rela­ tion to the Father. All these elements in the knowledge of Christ which he brought with him, acquire a new: value from the relation in which they were placed amid such surroundings, to the speculations of all kinds which were current there. The day came, no doubt after many years, when the churches said to themselves that the apostle who was the depositary of such treasures would not live always, and did not belong to them alone ; and measuring the distance between the teaching which they had enjoyed and that which they found given in the existing Gospels, they asked John to put in writing what be had narrated to them. He consented, and opened bis work with a preface, in which, putting his history into connection with those efforts of human wisdom of which he was daily witness, he laid down with a firm hand the central point of the Gospel history, the incarnation, and im­ pressed every reader with the vital importance of the history he was about to read : the Christ, the subject of the work, would be life to him, as well as to the disciples, if he received Him; death, as to the Jews, if he rejected Him (John i. 1-18). Later, there proceeded from his apostolical labours in those same churches the same apostle's first Epwtle, in which as a father he addresses mature men, youths, and children, and in which he alludes in the first lines to the testimony which he does not cease to give among them to that great fact of the incarnation which he, as it were, saw with kw eyes, and touched with kis hands. Some have thought to find in ver. 4 : " And we write unto you" (comp. ii. 14, 21, 26, etc.), an allusion to the composition and sending of the Gospel. We do not think we are authorized by the context to apply these expres­ sions to any other writing than the Epistle itsel£ The two small Epwtles issued from the same surroundings. They seem to us, indeed, to belong to the same author. Inde­ pendently of the identity of style, who else than John could have designated himself simply by the title: the Elder (o 7rpe<>f)vTepoc;), without adding his name 1 An official pres­ byter of the church of Ephesus could not have done so, for he had colleagues, elders as well as himself; and if the word is taken here in the sense it has in the fragment of Papias : an immediate disciple of the Lord, no other than the Apostle GODET L T JOHN. 290 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL, [BOOK IIL

John could appropriate the name so absolutely, and as an exclusive title. Finally, it :was no doubt later still, during a temporary exile, and under the impression of Domitian's recent persecu­ tion, that John composed his last work : the .Apocalypse, in which, contemplating as from a rocky height the age that had gone past, and those that were to follow, he completes the view of Christ come by that of Christ coming again, and pre­ pares the church for the prolonged struggles and the final crisis which shall precede His return.1 There is a fact fitted to awaken the reflection of thinkers. St. Paul, the founder of the churches of .Asia Minor, must have left his type of doctrine deeply impressed on the life of those churches. And yet the Pauline impress is almost effaced in the whole theological literature of Asia Minor in the second century. And this disappearance is by no means the effect of weakening or decay; there is a substitution. It is the appearance of a new impress, equal at least in dignity to the former, the trace of another influence not less Christian, but of a different character. .Another equally powerful personality has passed through them, and given a particular and entirely new stamp to the Christian life and thought of those countries. This phenomenon is the more remarkable because the history of the church of the West presents to us one of a wholly opposite kind. Here the Pauline type remains ; it reigns without a rival down to the third and fourth centuries ; it recurs at every instant in the conflicts of a purely anthropo­ logical character which agitate this part of the church. And when it is gradually effaced, it is not to give place to another quite as elevated and spiritual, but it is in the way of gradual weakening and a course of growing materialization and ritualism. This broad fact should suffice to prove that the two Johan­ nine books, which are the documents of the new type impressed on the churches of Asia, the fourth Gospel and the first Epistle, are not the works of a Christian of second rank, of some unknown disciple, but that they proceed from one of the peers of the apostle of the Gentiles, one of those disciples

l For reasons which prevent us from placing the composition of the Apocalyp88 ..arlier, see my Etudes bibliques, 3d ed. t. ii. pp. 325-330. CHAP. IV.] THE OCCASION AND AIM OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 291

who drank at the fountainhead, an immediate and particularly intimate heir of Christ. We are well aware what stops short a number of excellent minds, when they would sum up in the inmost tribunal the acts of this great process with a sentence favourable to the apostolic origin of our GospeL They are afraid, if they recog­ nise in Christ the appearance of a Divine Being, that they will lose in Him the true man. This anxiety will vanish the instant they substitute for the traditional notion of the incar­ nation the true biblical notion of this supreme fact. From the truly scriptural point of view, indeed, there are not in Christ two opposite and contradictory modes of being, pro­ ceeding side by side in one and the same person. What the apostles show us in Him, is a human mode of existence sub­ stituted, through the voluntary humiliation of the Saviour of men, for His divine mode of existence,-then transformed, by a holy and normal development, so as to be able to serve as an organ for the divine life, and to realize the original glory of the Son of God. And let us not forget that this trans­ formation of our human existence into a glorified humanity is not carried out in Christ alone ; it is carried out in Him, only that through Him it may be realized in all those who are united to Him by faith : " To all them that received Him, He gave power to become sons of God, even to them that believe in His name; and [in fact] the Word was made flesh" (i 13, 14). If the So.n abandons for a time the divine state to descend into our human mode of being, it is to draw us into that ascending movement which, from the day of His incar­ nation, He impresses in His very person on the history of humanity, which from Pentecost onwards He communicates to all believers, and the goal of which is to be : God all in all, as its point of departure was : God all in one. The domain of being passes infinitely beyond that of thought, not absolute thought, but ours.-Do we not see, even in our narrowly limited human life, the inspirations of love infinitely transcending the calculations of the understanding 1 How much more when the matter in question is the inspira­ tions of divine love in relation to the thoughts of the human mind! To accept the bringing down by faith into the sphere of 292 THE ORIGIN OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. [BOOK IIL human life the living gift of eternal love, is to do three things all alike salutary. It is to dethrone man in his own heart; for the Son of God, by His voluntary self-abasement, constrains us to the sacrifice of self (Phil. ii. 5 ff.). It belongs to it to open heaven; for such a gift is an indissoluble bond between the heart of God and that of every man who accepts it. It is to make the believer the eternal abode of God; for Christ in him is God in him. Thereby God reigns. But suppress this gift by refusing or diminishing it,-and this is what those labour to achieve who make the fourth Gospel a treatise of theology instead of a history,-the human sphere closes on itself ; immediately man asserts himself; he is no longer nourished except from self; God withdraws. Man is enthroned and reigns here below. The thought of the gift of the only Son is not the fruit of human speculation ; it bears within it the seal of its divine or1gm. God alone could have thought thus, because God alone can love thus. Let us now with this certainty approach the study of the pages in which this great fact of divine love has been most distinctly revealed to the world ; and may these pages them­ selves speak louder than any pleader, and the time come when they shall no more need an advocate l COMMENTARY

ON TllE

G O S P E L O F S T. J O H N. PREFACE TO THE COMMENTARY.

FEEL myself constrained, in publishing this commentary I anew, to repeat the Dedication which accompanied the first edition. The words which I on that occasion addressed to the friend who since then has been removed from the scene of faith to that of sight, expressed, in a passing form, feelings which have never ceased to fill my heart. That Dedication will in par­ ticular apprize the studious_ youth of France and Switzerland how constantly they have been before my mind in the course of my former and my new studies, tbe fruit of which is offered to them in these pages. In the preface to his Bibelwerk, addressed to the church, M. de Bunsen thus expre.sses himself: " If the Gospel of J ohD is not the historical narrative of an eye-witness, but a myth, then we have no historical Christ, . . . and it is either a piece of the blindest superficiality or the bitterest irony to attempt to beguile us into the belief that a collective (gemeindlich) Christianity can still subsist on such a supposition" (p. x.). The conditions on which a collective Christianity may exist differ, indeed, from those of individual Christianity. The individual may to a certain extent find spiritual life and moral health in faith in a Son of man who gradually ascends to heaven and becomes God. Such a believer is like the woman who touched the hem of Jesus' garment and obtained healing virtue by the touch. But the creative power which produced the church, which has upheld it till now throughout the ages, and which guaran­ tees its future existence and its final triumph-this cannot 295 296 PREFACE TO THE COMMENTARY. proceed from attachment to a man who has become God ; it emanates only from faith in the Son of God made man, faith in the Christ who, before ascending to God, came down from His presence as the perfect gift of His love. The Son of man

But it is impossible nowadays to conceal from ourselves the fact,-the question of the Johannine writing is determined by another graver still : that of the Johannine Christ ; and most frequently it is the latter which sways the solution of tho , former. Nothing can prevent the critic, whose inward feeling, for one reason or another, is repugnant to the Christ of John, from resolving the question of the fourth Gospel in a way •ilonformed to the secret wish of his antipathy ; as, on the other hand, the author, whose deepest and holiest aspirations are awakened on meeting with the figure of that same Christ, " full of grace and truth," will soon find in the lights pro­ -0eeding from such profound sympathy the solution of critical difficulties which have been declared insurmountable. When, on the one hand, we see V olkmar, that he may be able to place the composition of the Gospel of the Logos about 16 0, resolved to make its author the disciple of Justin (!),-and when, on the other hand, we see Keim, obliged by his testimonies and quotations to carry back the

NBUOBATEL, Nove:niber 1876. CONTENTS. 2!Hl

EXPOSIT ION.

f.&GB INTRODUCTION, 303

r. The different Conceptions of the Plan of the GoapeJ. 303 11. Or the Preservation of the Text, 312 1. The Manuscripts, 312 2. The Old Versions, 316 3. The Fathers, 318 The Title of the Gospel, 323 THE PROLOGUE (Chap. i. 1-18), 326 First Section (Vv. 1-4-The Logos}, 329 Second Section (Vv. 5-11-Unbelief), 339 Third Section (Vv. 12-18-Faith), 352 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ON THE PROLOGUE, 331 1. The Plan of the Prologne, . 381 2. Intention of the Prologne, • 38~ 3. The Idea and Term Logos, . 386 4. The Truth and Importance of the Conception of the Persoo of Jesus expressed in the Prologue, 394

FIRST PART. (I. 19-IV. 54.)

FIRST MANIFESTATIONS OF THE WoRD-THE BIRTH OF .FA1·ca-Frn1

FIRST CYCLE. (I. 19-II. 11.)

FIRST SECTION.

The Testimonies of John the Baptist (i. 19-87), 406 First Testimony (vv. 19-28), 407 Second Testimony (vv. 29-34), 419 Third Testimony (vv. 35-37), 436

SECOND SECTION. Beginnings of the Work of Jesus-Birth of Faith (L ll&-61). 00 First Group (vv. 38-42), 441 Second Group (vv. 43-51),. 4.4.1 •rhe Son ot M,w. 457 lNTRODUC'J.1ION. INTRODUCTION.

EVOTING the first part of our volume to the general D introduction to the Fourth Gospel, we have reserved two subjects which, from their very nature, appear to us more appropriately treated in a special introduction to the commentary properly so called. These are the statement of the leading opinions in regard to the plan of the Gospel, and the enumeration of the most important documents in which the text of this narrative has been preserved to us. These two topics form the subject of the two chapters of this introduction.

CH.APTER l

THE DIFFERENT CONCEPTIONS OF THE PLAN OF THE GOSPEL.

Between the exegesis of the Fathers and modern works on the Gospel of John there is a marked difference. With the former, the idea of a plan and a systematic order seems almost to have no existence, so entirely is the historical character of the writing assumed as certain. .According to the modern con­ ception, on the contrary, of which Baur's work is the most complete expression, the idea plays so decisive a part, that not only does it determine its order and plan, but furnishes even its substance, so that fact, as such, is almost annihilated; and that allegorical exposition, the name of which till now recalled the worst days of exegesis, is reinstaterl as the really normril method of interpretation. In the eyes of the ancients, our Gospel was only a collection of facts and discourses accident­ ally connected with one another. .At the present day, on the 8118 304 INTRODUCTION. [CHAF. I. contrary, it is a work of the reason rigorously systematic, the purest synthesis of the Christian idea, but a work as inde­ pendent of history as it is possible for the Ethics of Spinoza to be of sensible realities. This complete reversal of the point of view has come about gradually. The works of Lampe, de W ette, Schweizer, and Baur seem to me to form the main points in this scientific process.1 Lampe was the first to propose, according to Liicke, a. general division of the Gospel. It was still very rude : 1. The prologue, i. 1-18; 2. The narrative, i. 19-xx. 29; 3. The epilogue, xx. 30-xxi. 25. Then, what had greater value, he subdivided the narrative into two parts: .A, The public mini­ stry of our Lord, i. 19-xii. 5 0 ; B, The last acts of His life, xiii. 1-xx. 29. Lampe had thus put his finger upon one of the leading divisions of the Gospel. A.ll his successors who have effaced the boundary line between chaps. xii. and xiii. have gone backward in the understanding of John's work. Eichhorn made no change in this division. Only he gave other titles to the two parts of the narrative properly so called : 1. The first, i. 19-xii., was intended, according to him, to demonstrate that Jesus is the promised Messiah ; 2. The second, xiii.-x:x., contains the account of the last days of His life. This was not a real improvement. The contents of the first part are badly designated (Eichhorn applies to the first twelve chapters what really applies only to the first four); and the idea of the second part is not logically co-ordinate with that of the first. Before Eichhorn, Bengel 2 had endeavoured to settle the division of the Gospel on another principle. After ingeni­ ously bringing into correspondence the initial week (i. 19- ii. 11) and the final week (xii. 1-xx. 31), regarding them as pendants, he divided the intermediate history according to the feasts, holding chiefly by the three journeys of Jesus to J eru­ salem, mentioned ii. 13 (Passover), v. 1 (Pentecost, according to Bengel), vii. 2 (Tabernacles). But this arrangement evidently rested on too external a principle. It had, besides, the great disadvantage of obliterating the separation so strongly marked 1 Jn treating this subject, we are 1mder special obligation to the work w Luthardt, das Joh. Evang., 2d ed., i. pp. 200-222. 2 Gnomon N. T., 17 42. CHAP. I.] PLAN OF THE GOSPEL. 305 by the evangelist himself, and indicated by Lampe, between chap. xii. and xiii. Nevertheless, Bengel was followed by Olshausen, who, in accordance with this principle of division, laid down these four parts: 1. i.-vi.; 2. vii-xi.; 3. xii.-xvii.; 4. xviii.-xxi. Liicke himself, in his first two editions, despaired of reaching a profounder plan, and contented himself with striving to improve the division which is founded on the journeys to the feasts. De W ette was the first to discern and bring out the development of one idea in our Gospel. The glory of Christ, such was the thought round which the entire work seemed to him to revolve: 1. The first chapter unfolds the idea sum­ marily ; 2. The first part of the narrative (ii.-xii.) exhibits it translated into action in the ministry of Jesus, and that : A, By particular examples (ii.-vi.) ; B, By the preparation for the catastrophe during the last visits of Jesus to Judea (vii.-xii.); 3. The glory of our Lord appears in all its brightness in the second part of the narrative (xiii.-xx.), and that: A, Inwardly and morally, in His sufferings and death (xiii.-xix.) ; and B, Outwardly and sensibly, in the triumphant event of the resurrection (:xx.). This great and beautiful conception, by which de W ette certainly forms an epoch in the understanding of our Gospel, prevailed in exegesis for a time. Liicke came decidedly under its influence in his third edition; but at the same time he introduced a subdivision, which must not be lost sight of. That is the separation between chap. iv. and v. Indeed, up to chap. iv. the opposition to Jesus does not yet make itself distinctly known. From chap. v. it gives character to the narrative, and goes on increasing to chap. xii. Baumgarten-Crusius, taking advantage of de Wette's con­ ception, and of the happy subdivision introduced by Liicke, was led to adopt the following arrangement :-1. The works of Christ, i.-iv.; 2. His struggles, v.-xii.; 3. His moral victory, xiii.-xix. ; 4. His final glory, :xx. It was de W ette's idea put ma still better form than it had been by de W ette him­ self. It was the first thoroughly rational division of the whole contents of our Gospel. Almost all the leading divisions of the narrative were established and indicated (v., xiii., xx.). Yet the division of de Wette and of those who followed GODET. u JOHN. IKTR')DUCTION. [CHAP. L him takes account of only one of the elements of the narra­ tive, the objective factor, if one may so speak, Christ and His manifestation. But there is another element in John's nar­ rative, the subjective factor, the conduct of men towards our Lord on occasion of His revelation, the faith of some and the unbelief of others. .Alexander Schweizer vindicated a place for this human element in the general order of our Gospel He assigned it even the decisive part, and that while resting mainly on the side of unbelief. He maintains the following plan, which re­ produces precisely the leading sections which we have just indicated :-1. The struggle making itself heard in the dis­ tance, i.-iv. ; 2. Breaking out in all its violence, v.-xii. ; :1. The issue, xiii.-xx. Thus understood, the Gospel becomes a drama, and assumes a tragic interest. But in the conduct of men towards our Lord, unbelief is but one side. Does not the element of faith remain too much in the background in this conception of Schweizer 1 The factor thus neglected could not long fail to vindicate its place. Before coming to this point, so easily foreseen, we ought to mention some remarkable works which appear to us to be connected, if not historically at least in principle, with the standpoint already mentioned. Like de W ette and Baum­ garten-Crusius, M. Reuss makes the general order of the Gospel turn on the revelation of Christ.1 He maintains three parts: 1. Jesus revealing Himself to the world, i.-xii.; enrol­ ling, i.-iv.; then selecting, v.-xii.; 2. Jesus revealing Him­ self to His own, xiii.-xvii., seeking to infuse into their heart, and to convert into their innermost life, the speculative ideas expressed in the first part in a dogmatical or polemical form. Thus far the order is perfectly logical, and in those few words there are undoubtedly contained ideas fitted to shed light on the progress of Christ's work in our fourth Gospel. But here arises a difficulty, due to the general standpoint which M. Reuss takes up in regard to the work of John : the rational division is exhausted. There is no third term to be placed logically beside the world and believers. .And yet the Gospel is not at an end, and a place must be assigned to the three

1 Hist. de la 'l'heot. chret., 2d etl., t. ii., pp. 392-394. Die Gesch. der hf,il. Sehr. N. T., 5th ed., 1874, sec. 221. ,CHAP. L} PLAN OF TllE GOSPEL. 307

,chapters which yet remain. M. Reuss forms them into a. third part, which he entitles, "The denouement of the two relations previously established," xviii.-xx. But how does the narrative of Christ's death and resurrection resolve the knot formed by the twofold relation of Jesus to the world ,and believers ? Inasmuch, answers M. Reuss, as "Jesus remains dead to the unbelieving, while to believers He rises .again victoriously." If, in such a matter, an ingenious phrase were enough, one might declare himself satisfied. But can M. Reuss be so himself? Must he not perceive that a purely nistorical . termination does not square with a speculative gospel-an ideal work, such as his Gospel of John is 1 Specu­ lative theorems and historic facts are not to be summed up in -order one, two, three, unless we have come to the conclusio11 to see in the latter also nothing but ideas, a religion, or a system of morals in action. And is not this what M. Reuss really seems to do, when he closes his analysis of our Gospel with the words, " Thus it is that the history to its very end is the mirror of religious truths " ? What ! events like those of the Saviour's death and resurrection transformed into simple illustrations of religious truth,-in other words, of John's meta­ physics ? But in no other way is it possible for M. Reuss to make of the Gospel a homogeneous whole, and to co-ordinate the third part logically with the other two. We see at what -cost this higher conception must be purchased, which regards the fourth Gospel as formed by John's reflections

(Tabernacles); 4. x. 22 (Dedication); 5. xii. 1 (Passover). :Besides the disadvantage already referred to, of effacing the line of demarcation so distinctly traced by the evangelist himself between chaps. xii. and xiii., this division has the further defect of converting into a sort of appendix that whole­ important part of the narrative which is anterior to the first feast-journey, i. 19-ii. 12. M. F. de Rougemont, in his translation of Olshausen's Commentary, 1844, has described the plan which, so far as the distinction and ordering of the parts goes, appears to me to come nearest to the truth : 1. Jesus attracts to Himself those who "do" the truth, i.-iv.; 2. He reveals Himself to­ the world, which rejects Him, v.-xii.; 3. He manifests Him­ self fully to His disciples, xiii.-xvii.; 4. He dies after having· finished His work, xviii., xix. ; 5. He rises again, and becomes­ through the Holy Ghost the source of life to believers, xx. The only defect in this arrangement seems to me to lie in the­ name which it gives to the contents of certain parts, and in the absence of a distinct logical relation between them. The foregoing review has exhibited three principal factors­ in the narrative of our Gospel: Jesus, faith, and unbelief; or, to define more exactly: the manifestation of Jesus as the· Messiah and Son of God ; the birth, growth, and perfecting of faith in the disciples ; the parallel development of national­ unbelief. De Wette, Schweizer, and Baur have shown us in their plans the chief example of three divisions founded solely or mainly on one of those factor~, But those attempts have all failed. We have seen those frames break down in, succession through the impossibility of including in them this or that part of the narrative; a fact which is easily explained if our Gospel is a work of a really historical nature. A rational framework applied to history must always have· something artificial about it, and betray its insufficiency on some side. Fact must always pass beyond the ideal, because it includes the incalculable element of liberty. If, then, renouncing synthetical divisions, which are connected more or less with the view that the fourth Gospel is essentially a work of reason, we ask the book itself to give the secret of its­ internal arrangement, we find the narrative dividing itself into five groups, exhibiting a very natural gradation, which CHAP. J.j PLAN OF THE GOSP;i;L. 811

the plans indicated above have succes,ively brought to light: 1. i. 19-iv. The manifestation of our Lord as the Messiah • and as a subsidiary subject, the birth and first developments of' faith, and the first hardly-perceptible symptoms of unbelief. 2. v.-xii The powerful and rapid development of national unbelief, unfolding itself, however, on the basis of the growing revelation of Jesus as the Son of God, and advancing side by side with the development of the faith of the disciples, which is getting confirmed and rooted by means of those struggles. 3. xiii.-xvii. The energetic and decisive development of faith in the disciples during the last hours which they passed with their Master ; and that by means of the highest revela­ tions of Jesus, and in consequence of the expulsion of that disciple in whose person unbelief had till then maintained its footing, even in the bosom of the chosen circle. 4. xviii., xix. The consummation of national unbelief in , the murder of the Messiah, contrasting with the calm shining of the glory of Jesus athwart that gloomy night, as well as with the silent growth of faith in the few disciples whose eyes were able to admit those mild glories. 5. xx. (xxi) The appearances of the Risen One, which, as supreme revelations of Jesus, consummate the victory of faith over the last remains of unbelief in the apostolical college. Exegesis will show whether this summary of the narrative is in conformity with the text and spirit of the writing. If it is so, the three chief elements which we have named will be unfolded simultaneously and face to face with one another in every part of the narrative, with this difference, that while the first - the revelation of Jesus - forms the permanent basis of the narrative, the other two -arise alternately, the one with an ever purer brilliancy, the other in more and more sombre hues, on this common background. Faith is born, i.-iv. ; unbelief prevails, v.-xii. ; faith reaches its relative per­ fection, xiii.-xvii.; unbelief is consummated, xviii., xix. ; faith reaches its perfection, xx. (xxi.) There is in the arrangement of the Gospel, as we have understood it, nothing systematic, nothing factitious. It is the photography of history. If exegesis establishes the reality of this plan, which is at once so natural and profound, 312 INTRODUCTION. [CHAP. I. we shall find in the fact an important confirmation of the really historical character and the seriously practical aim of our Gospel Imagine a spring day with the sun rising in a bright sky. The ground, moistened with the snows of winter, greedily absorbs his warm rays ; everything which is capable of life awakes and is renewed ; nature travails. Yet, after some hours, vapours rise from the damp earth ; they unite and form an obscure canopy. The sun is veiled; a storm is threatened. The plants, under the impulse which they have received, nevertheless accomplish their silent progress. A.t length, when the sun has reached the meridian, the storm breaks forth and rages ; nature is given over to destructive powers ; she loses for a time her quickening star. But at eventide the clouds disperse ; calm is restored ; and the sun, reappearing in more magnificent brilliancy than that which attended his rising, casts on all those plants-the children of his rays-a last smile and a sweet 'adieu.-Thus, as it appears to us, the work of St. John is developed. This plan, if it is real, is not thG work of theological reflection ; it is the product of long­ contemplated history. Conceived in the calm of memory and the security of possession, it has nothing in common with the combinations of metaphysical labour or the subtle calculations of ecclesiastical policy.

CHAPTER IL

ON THE PRESERVATION OF THE TEXT.

The text of our Gospel has been preserved, in whole or in fragments, in three kinds of documents · manuscripts, xncient versions, and quotations of the Fathers.

I. The Manuscripts. The manuscripts (Mss.) are divided into two great classes : -those which are written in uncial letters called majusculea (Mjj.), and those in which we meet with the rounded and ·CHAP, II.] THE PRINCIPAL DOCUMENTS. 313

,cursive writing which has been in use since the tenth century ,of our era, the minuscules (Mnn.).1

I. The mafuscules having acquired a sort of individual value in critical science, and having been raised to the rank of real personages, it is of impor.tance to form a particular acquaint­ ance with each of them. To facilitate the study of the reader, we shall divide them into three groups : 1. The vetiistissimi; those, namely, which date from the fourth and fifth centuries, the patriarchs. 2. The vetustiores, ascending to the sixth and seventh centuries. 3. The vetusti, or simple veterans, the pro, ducts of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. They are desig, nated, since the time of W etstein, by means of the majilscule letters of the Latin, Greek, or even Hebrew alphabets.2 The first group comprehends at present four MSS., more or less complete, and four documents which are altogethe1 ·fragmentary.

1. Cod. Sinaiticus (~); at St. Petersburg; discovered by Tischendorf on the 4th February 1859 in the monastery of St. ·Catherine on Mount Sinai; dating, according to this learned author, from the first part of the fourth century; according to •others,-Volkmar, for example,-from the end of the fourth o:r beginning of the fifth century; written, probably, at .Alex­ andria ; retouched by several correctors. It contains our Gospel without a blank. Published by Tischendorf, Leipsic 1863. 2. Cod. Vaticanus (B); dating, according to Tischendorf, from the middle of the fourth century; probably written in Egypt; containing our Gospel without a blank. Published by Tischendorf, Nov. Test. Vaticanum, Lipsire 1871. 3. Cod. Ephraemi (0), No. 9 of the Imperial Library of Paris, rescriptus; according to Tischendorf, of the first part of the fifth century; written, probably, in Egypt; retouched in the sixth and ninth centuries. In the twelfth century the text •of the New Testament was effaced to give place to that of the works of Ephrem, a Father of the Syrian church. The ancient writing has been recovered by chemical means, but this manu­ script still presents considerable blanks. Of our Gospel, only

l We do not speak here of FJvangelistaria and Lectionaria, embracing the , contents of such pieces of the Gospels and Epistles as were set apart for regular Teading in public worship. 2 We shall employ the signs adopted by Tischendorf in his eighth anrl la~t ,edition of 1872. 314 INTRODUCTION, [CHAP. II. the eight following passages have been restored: i. 1-41, iii 3 3-v. 16, vi. 38-vii. 3, viii. 34-ix. 11, xi. 8-46, xiii. 8-xiv. 7• xvi. 21-xviii. 36, xx. 26 to the end of the Gospel. 4. Ood. Ale,xandrinus (A) ; at London; of the second half of the fifth century; written, probably, at Alexandria. One blank "nly in our Gospel: vi. 50-viii. 52. 5. Seven palimpsest fragments (I) found in Egypt by Tischen­ dorf; dating from the fifth and sixth centuries, and containing of John's Gospel some passages of chaps. iv., xi., xii., xv., xvi., and xix. 6. Fragments brought from an Egyptian monastery (P); at. London; dating from the fourth or fifth centuries, according to Tischendorf; containing of John some verses of chaps. xiii. and xvi. 7. A palimpsest fragment (Q); of the fifth century, accord­ ing to Tischendorf; found in the W olfenbiittel Library ; con­ taining of our Gospel the two following passages : xii. 3-20. xiv. 3-22. 8. :::iome fragments of a Ood. Borgianus (T) ; at Rome, fifth, century (Tischendorf), containing, parallel with the Egyptian translation called the Sahidic, the two passages: vi 28-67, vii 6-viii. 31.

The second group is more meagre. It contains only onEt MS. and five fragments, or collections of fragments.

9. Ood. Oantabrigiensis (D); at Cambridge; of the middle of the sixth century (Tischendorf); although filled with Alex­ andrine forms, it has no doubt been written in the West, and probably in Southern Gaul (Bleek, Einl. p. 707). Parallel with the Greek text there is found a Latin translation, earlier than that of Jerome. Two great blanks in our Gospel: i. 16-iii 26~ xviii. 13-xx. 13. 10. A palimpsest fragment (P); at Wolfenbiittel; of the sixth century; containing three passages of our Gospel: i. 29-41, ii. 13-25, xxi. 1-11. 11. Fragments of a splendid manuscript (N), four leaves of which are found at London, two at Vienna, six at Rome, thirty three at Patmos ; of the end of the sixth century (Tischendorf): containing of John: xiv. 2-10, xv. 15-22. 12. Fragments obtained by Tischendorf from the Porphyri Library ( ee "nd ll) ; of the sixth century; passages of chaps. vi. and xviii. 13. Some fragments (Tb); at St Petersburg; of the sixth, century; passages of chaps. i., ii., and iv. of our Gospel. 14. Marginal annotations (Fa) in the Cod. Ooisliniani1lS of CHAP. U.] THE PRINCIPAL DOCUMENTS. 315

Paul's Epistles (H-202 of the Imperial Library of Paris)· con­ taining some verses of John from a text of the seventh c~ntury (v. 35 and vi 53, 55).

The third group is the most considerable : it contains eleven Mss. more or less complete, and fragments of six others.

15. Ood. Basileensis (E); at Basle; of the eighth century; it appears to have been used in public worship in one of the churches of Constantinople ; it contains the entire Gospel of John. 16. The beautiful Paris Cod. (L); of the eighth century; it wants only xxi. 15 to the end. 17. Fragments of a Cod. of the Barberini Library (Y); of the eighth century; containing of our Gospel: xvi. 3-xix. 41. 18. Cod. Sangallensis (A); written in the ninth century by the Scotch or Irish monks of the monastery of St. Gall ; entire, except xix. 17-35. This Cod. contains an interlined Latin translation, which is neither that of Jerome nor the version anterior to that Father. 19. Cod. Boreeli (F); at Utrecht; of the ninth century; con­ taining of our Gospel~ i. I-xiii. 34, but with numerous blanks. 20. Cod. Seidelii (G); brought from the East by Seidel; at London; of the ninth or tenth centuries; two blanks : xviii 5-19 and xix. 4-27. 21. A second Cod. Seidelii (H); at Hamburg; of the ninth or tenth centuries ; some blanks in ix., x., xviii., and xx. 22. Ood. Cyprius (K) ; at Paris; of the ninth century; brought from the island of Cyprus to the Colbert Library ; entire. 23. The Cod. of des Camps (M); at Paris; of the ninth century; presented to Louis XIV. in 1706 by the Abbe of des Camps ; entire. 24. Fragments of a Cod. from Mount Athos (0) ; at Moscow ; of the ninth century; containing i. 1-4 and xx. 10-13. 25. A fragment from the library of Moscow (V); of the ninth century; coutaining i. I-vii. 39. 26. A Cod. brought from the East by Tiscbendorf (r); at Oxford and St. Petersburg; ninth century; containing iv. 14-viii. 3 and XY. 24-xix. 6. 27 . .A Cod. brought frvm the East by Tischendorf (A) ; at Oxford ; ninth century ; entire. 28. Fragment of a Cod. (X); m the University Library at Munich; containing passages of i., ii., ,·ii.-xvi. 29. A Cod. brought from Smyrna by 'l'ischendorf (n); ninth l:entury; entire. INTRODUCTION.

30. A Cod. of the Vatican (S); of the year 94-9; entire. 31. A Cod. of Venice (U); of the tenth century; entire. Thus we have our Gospel in thirty-one documents in uncial letters, entire, almost entire, or wholly fragmentary. The oldest of those MSS., it is well known, bear almost no trace of accentuation, punctuation, or separation of words and periods. These different elements were introduced into the text gradu­ ally; and that is one of the means which serve to determine the age of the manuscripts. We dare not therefore allow those elements of the text any sort of authority.

II. There are reckoned more than five hundred minuscules deposited in the different libraries of Europe. All have not yet been collated. Though they are all more recent in origin than the Mjj., some of them may nevertheless have been copied from documents which had a text anterior to that which the latter reproduce. Some occasionally offer very remarkable readings; witness the Cod. 63 (Tisch.), which alone exhibits the omission of John xxi. 25, now supported by the Cod. :Sinaiticus. II.

TM Old Versions.

The translations (V ss.) have the disadvantage that they do not present the text of the New Testament directly, but leave it to be conjectured. Yet they, too, can render important ser­ vices to the criticism of the text, especially when the question relates to the omission or interpolation of words and passages, and the more so as many of them are much earlier than our oldest manuscripts. There are two of them which, for critical importance, excel all the others : the ancient Syriac translation called Peschito, and the old Latin translation which, from a passage of St. Augustine, has received the name of Jtala. I. Peschito (Syr.). This translation (the name of which seems to signify the simple, the faithful1) goes back certainly to the second century 1 Tischendorf thinks otherwise. See Bleek, Einl. p. 720 ; and J. B. Glaire, Jru,·. hi8t. et crit., 1862, t. i. p. 187. CHAP. II.] THE PRINCIPAL DOCUMENTS.

of our era, and seems from the first to have had an eeclesiastica1 destination. It is in general what its name indicates, faithful without' servility. ·when necessary, it sacrifices the idiom of the Syriac language rather than depart greatly from the ori!rinal text,. The principal edition, that quoted by Tischendorf, i: the edition of Leusden and Schaaf, 1709 and 1717 (Syr•0h). Cureton, from a Syrian manuscript of the fourth century found in an Egyptian monastery, has published fragments of a translation of the Gospels which contain the following passages of John: i. 1-42, iii. 6-vii. 37, xiv. 11-28 (Syr0 u•). There is another Syriac version, made at the beginning of the sixth century; it is called the Philoxenian translation (SyrP).

II. Itala (It.). Long before the time of St. Jerome, and probably from the middle of the second century, there existed a Latin translation of the New Testament. It was even more necessary in pro­ consular Africa than in Italy, where the Greek language was better known. It is probable, therefore, that it was composed here and spread from this province. It appears to have been slavish to excess, and extremely rude. It existed in very varied forms. We possess several copies of those old Latin versions,. first in bilingual manuscripts; as to the Gospel of John, the only one which contains it is Cod. D, the Latin translation of which is designated by d; then in particular manuscripts, such as the Vercellensis, of the fourth century (a); the Veronensis, of the fourth or fifth centuries (b); the Colbertinus, of the eleventh century (c), etc. About the end of the fourth century, St. Jerome entered upon a work of revision in relation to this ancient translation, similar to that which, in the Syrian church, produced the Philoxenian translation. He corrected the version in use by ancient Greek manuscripts. This translation, the Vulgate (Vg.), is preserved in several documents of high antiquity, but which are far from being always in harmony with one another, or with the presently authorized form of this important version; for example, the­ Cod . .Amiatinus (am.) and the Fuldensis (fold.), both of the sixth century. Of the other ancient translations, the most interesting for criti­ cal use are the three Egyptian versions: the Sahidic (Sah.), in the dialect of Upper Egypt; the Coptic (Cop.) translation, in that of Lower Egypt; aLd the Baschmuric (Bas.) translation, in a third dialect, which Champollion the younger supposed to be that of Fayoum. What gives those version8 a special interest is, firs~. their date (middle or end of the third century); and next, then· intimate relation to the !;ext of our oldest Greek manuscripts. 318 INTRODUCTION. [CHAP. U:.

III. Tke Fathers.

The quotations from the New Testament contained in the writings of the Fathers have been called "Fragments of ancient manuscripts." This definition is inexact, except when the author intends to quote textually. Very often, the Fathers quote from memory, or merely according to the sense. The most interesting authors, so far as criticism of the text is concerned, are Irenreus (Ir.), Clement of Alexandria (Clem.), Tertullian (Tert.), Origen (Or.), Ohrysostom (Ohrys.). We shall often have to collate the readings of Origen with those of the oldest Greek MSS. ; and from the relations existing between them, we may have to draw some conclusions which are not without importance as bearing on the normal recon­ struction of the primitive text. The readings of the heretics, and particularly (in so far as concerns our Gospel) of Heracleon. have also a certain value.

IV.

The above remarks, as much abridged as possible, will suffice to put readers who have not yet busied themselves with the criticism of the text in a position to understand that part of our commentary which refers to this essential branch of exegesis, and to render accessible to them the great edition of Tischendorf (8th, 1872), in the notes of which there is concentrated the result of immense labours. Since the time of Bengel, it has been an established point that the critical documents tend to form themselves into groups with a considerable measure of regularity. Thus, in Paul's Epistles, if we take a list of variations with an indica­ tion of the authorities on which the different readings rest, it is enough to run over a few pages to discover easily three groups of documents which sometimes follow each their own way, again unite two against one, sometimes also proceeding m unison. In the Gospels, those opposite camps tend to reduce themselves to two. But the strife is permanent; it is ~'IIAP. II.] THE PRINCIPAL DOCUMENTS. 319 reproduced almost at every verse. These are, on the one side .among the Mjj., BC L X; 1 among the vss., the Coptic trans: lation; and among the Fathers, most notably Origen ; on the ,other, among the Mss., the Mjj. E F G HK S U VA, and almost the entire body of the Mnn. ; and among the Fathers, fre­ .quently Ohrysostom. The other authorities: ~AD MI' ..1 ll, Syr. It., oscillate between those two pal'ties; some inclining more habitually to one of the texts, the others towards the -opposite text. As the text presented by the authorities which are com­ prehended in the second of those two groups appears to be that which had prevailed in the churches of the Greek Empire, it is called Byzantine; while the opposite text, repro­ -duced in the most ancient Greek MSS., evidently originating from Alexandria, has received the name of Alexandrine, The question, then, which will present itself at every step will be this : to which of the two texts the preference is to be :given. It is true, this is no longer a question in the eyes of many exegetes and critics; to hear them, it would seem that only ignorance or prejudice can still defend the Byzantine . ~ext. The editions of Lachmann and the work of M. Rilliet (introduction and translation) exhibit the climax of this tendency. Notwithstanding, Matthrei, Scholz, Rinck, and Reiche have undertaken, both in general and in a multitude -of particular instances, to defend the Byzantine text. It is well known that this text is almost the same as that which is commonly called the Receii,ed text (T. R.).2 For the :Byzantine documents being the first which came into the hands of those who edited the New Testament after the dis­ -covery of printing, it was this text which accidentally pre­ vailed in ordinary use, until the labours of Mill, Bengel, Wetstein, Griesbach, etc., having brought to light the read­ ings of the opposite text contained in the oldest Greek MSS.,

1 Row does M. Rilliet (in his translation of the N. T. from the text of the ·Cod. Vaticanus, p. xxxiv.) arrange the MS. X in the other class f X proceccls a.lmost constantly along with B O L. 2 The sign,; (the Greek st), used by Tischendorf to designate the T. R., is used from the fact that it is in general the same as that of the large edition of Robert Stephen, Stephani tertia, of 1550. In the 145 to 150 passages where the read• kg of Stephen differs from the Received text (that of the Elzevir editions o1 1624 and 1633), the latter 18 specially designated by •. INTRODUCTION. [CHAP. IL. a reaction took place against the Received text, and the­ balance inclined decidedly to the side of the Alexandrine­ text. Is the question of superiority finally resolved ? Can it. even be settled in a general and absolute way ? I cannot. help doubting if it can. We are at this moment under the sway of a reaction ; and it is the common fate of reactions to "pass beyond the truth." When we see Meyer, despite his evident prejudice in favour of the Alexandrine text, forced by his good exegetical sense to give the preference, by several relapses so to speak, in every chapter to the Byzantine read­ ing ; when we see Tischendorf himself, in his edition of 18 5 9, previously to the discovery of the Sinaiticus, restoring to his text a multitude of Byzantine readings which he had discarded in preceding editions in favour of Alexandrine variations ; when one has himself practised exegesis for a. certain time, and has been obliged at every instant to, recognise in the text of the MSS. BC L traces of arbitrary corrections arising from the grammatical purism of the Alex­ andrine literati,1-he feels that he must abstain from every a priori principle, and that substituting one prejudice for­ another would not be to advance science. And is it not really a prejudice to imagine, as the learned ignorance of some does at the present day, especially since Tischendorf's recent good fortune, that the most anciently copied text is therefore the most ancient and pure ? As if the epoch of the transcription of a text were the real date of the text ! Does not a MS. of the tenth century copied from a. document of the second present an older text than a MS. of the fourth century transcribed from a document of the third '? Besides, the date of the original MS. is not even in this ques­ tion the chief matter. The really grave question is as to the degree of confidence with which the copyist regarded the document which he was transcribing. If he copied it with docility, without arrogating the place of corrector and censor,. the chances of alteration were infinitely reduced. But if the­ previous knowledge which he believed himeelf to have of the­ aiterations which the text had undergone filled him with dis- , Griesbach's good faith had already extorted from him the confession. "Gi-ammaticum egit Alexandrinus censor" (Preface to hi~ 2d edition). CHAP. Il.] THE PRINCIPAL DOCUMENTS. 321

trust of his model, there was no limit to the errors which his hardihood might commit. A transcription made in the fourth century under such conditions will be much more faulty than a copy executed in the tenth in a spirit of confiding simplicity. I am free to believe, for my own part, that those supposi­ tions are not altogether so gratuitous as might appear at first sight. It is neither from the fourth nor the fifth century that alterations of the text of the New Testament date. Origen complained of them bitterly even at the beginning of the third.1 He complained at Alexandria itself, where the evil was consequently not less, but where it was probably more considerable than anywhere else. And yet it is to MSS. . copied in that very city, and later than Origen by at least a century, that we are to attribute a superiority raised above all discussion ! But, it will be said, has not the Cod. Sinaiticus come to confirm in a striking way the superiority of the Alexandrine text ? To have the enormous importance attributed to it by Tischendorf; and to merit the applause with which its appear­ ance was hailed, this document would require to be ante ri01 to the age when alterations were introduced into the text. Otherwise, what have we in this codex? A new witness to the already known Alexandrine text. May we not apply here the judicious observation of Griesbach: "Produce the same actor twenty times on the stage, with as many different costumes and names, he will yet be always the same person" ? Let five or six documents more of the same kind be found, older than the Vaticanus and even the Sinaiticus, the ques­ tion will not thereby be decided. What would be more decisive, would be the discovery of a document of the Greek text anterior to the period when the beginning of alterations can be established. To sum up, there are only three suppositions possible : Either the Alexandrine text is on the whole the simple and natural reproduction of the primitive text, while the Byzantine

1 lnMatth. t. xv.: "It is evident that great diversity has been introduced into the manuscripts, either by the carelessness of certain copyists, or by the blame­ worthy audacity which has led some to correct the texts, or through the fault 01 those who allowed themselves to add or retrench what seemed to them good." GOD ET. X. JOHN. INTRODUl;TION. [CHAP. II, is the result of a gradual accommodation to the literary tastes which prevailed at Constantinople, and in the churches dependent on that metropolis ; or the Byzantine text is the docile and simple transcription of the apostolic text, while we have in the .Alexandrine text, with its continual abbreviations, the result of a work of correction in which the exegetes and grammarians of that capital of the scientific world thought themselves entitled to indulge, having to do with a text which they distrusted ; or, finally, both suppositions are simultan­ eously true, and are realized, the one in one case, the other in .;mother.... I do not pronounce. I merely ask of the reader an impartial and attentive study of the context in every par­ ticular case. All I wish by these reflections is, to keep open the question which there is an apparent wish to close, and to claim entire liberty in the discussion of details.1

' We are bappy to be able to quote in favour of our view the authority of Baumlein : " No one class of manuscripts can be named whose readings abso­ lutely deserve the preference'' (Comment. uber d. ]i}u. Joh. 1863, p. I); and that of the eminent English critic Scrivener, who, after a profound and length­ Ened stndy of all the documents, lays down as a first principle of criticism: the impossibility of restoring the original form of the N. T. by consulting only one class of manuscripts, and demonstrates this proposition by enumerating a series of errors in the two most ancient manuscripts, the Sinaiticus and the Vatican\13, We had already maintained this view vigorously in our first edition. THE TITLE OF THE GOSPEL.

HE title appears in the MSS. in different forms. The T simplest is that which we find in ~ B D: /CaTa 'IroaVV1}V (according to John). The most of the Mjj. and ~ have (at the end of the book), evaryryD.,iov ICaTa 'IrodVV1JV, Gospel aecording -to John; T. R., with a very large number of Mnn., Til /€aTa 'I. EiJaryry., the Gospel according to John. Stephen's third edition adds lvyiov (holy) before Evaryry., with several Mnn. Some Mnn. read, e,c Tov ,c, 'I. eVaryry. The vss. also vary: evang. Jokannis (Syr.); ev.per Joh. (Goth.); ev. secundum Joh. (Cop.); ev. sanctum prwdieationis Joh. prmconis (following certain editions of Syr.). All these variations sufficiently prove that the title does not come from the hand of the author or editor of the Gospel Had it belonged originally to the body of the work, it would be the same, or nearly so, in all the documents. It was un­ doubtedly added when the collection of the Gospels took place in the churches. Now, the forming of the Gospel collection came about more or less spontaneously in each locality, as is shown by the different arrangement of our four Gospels in the canons of the churches. The differences in the title are ex­ plained in the same way. But what is the exact meaning of the phrase: "aecording to John" l From the time of the Manichean Faustus (Augus­ tine, contra Faustum, xxxii. 2) down to our time, there have been learned authors who have given to ,caTa, according to, a very wide sense : Gospel compiled according to the type of preaching followed by Matthew, John, etc. So MM. Reuss (Gesch. der heil. Sehr. N. T., § 177) and Renan (Vie de Jesus, p. xvi.).1 The consequence would be, that those four phrases, 1 These phrases merely signify that such were the traditions euumating from -t>ach of those apostles, and resting Qll their authority. 324 THE TlTLi:!: OF THE GOSPEL. instead of attesting, would rather exclude the complete authen­ ticity of our Gospels. But the authors of those titles would thus have contradicted themselves ; for no one in the primitive church ever assigned to those four writings any other authors than those who are named in the titles,-a fact which holds good independently of certain particular traditions which, like that of Papias in reference to St. Matthew's Gospel, seem to contradict it. Besides, this meaning, according to, would not at all apply to the second and third Gospels; for Mark and Luke had never been regarded as the founders of a peculiar and independent tradition, but merely as the compilers of those which emanated from Peter and Paul. The title 0£ those two writings should therefore have been : Gospels. according to Peter and according to Paul, if, in reality, the­ word according to, in the mind of the authors of the titles, had had the meaning ascribed to it by the critics whom we are combating.1 Their error arises from their giving to the term gospel a meaning which it had not in the language of primitive· Christianity, and which it only received in the course of the second century. In the still living and spiritual language of the New Testament, this word never designates a book, a. writing relating the Saviour's coming, but the glad news of God to man, consisting in that coming itself; comp. for example, Mark i. 1 ; Rom. i 1. The meaning of the titles is not there­ fore: "a book compiled according to the tradition of" ..., but~ "the blessed advent of Jesus Christ related by the care or the pen of". . . It would not have been possible, in this sense of the word gospel, to say as we now do, "John's Gospel;" the ellipsis was rather: "the Gospel of God." Besides, we find the preposition KaTa used by Diodorus of Sicily to denote the author himself when he calls the work of Herodotus : " The History according to Herodotus" (~ Ka0' 'Hp. l,TTopta), or by Epiphanius (Haer. viii. 4) when he says : "The Pentateuch

1 We are not forgetting that, as to Mark's Gospel, there is assumed between our present Gospel and the immediate tradition of Peter, a writing now lost, w:1ich was Mark's real work, and formed the foundation of our second Gospel, and that thus the sense in which the "according to Mark" is taken is preserved. But, at lea,t, there is no such hypothesis regarding Luke's Gospel; and what­ ever may be the authority of the critics who at the present day defend the hypothesis of a Proto-Mark, we believe that it rests on very precarious grounds (S6t! our Comment. on St. Luke's Gospel, vol. ii. pp. 437-440). '!'HE TITLE OF THE GOSPEL. 32r; accor dmg. to M oses ('T/ • Ka-ra ' M wvuea.. I 'TT'ev-ra-revxoc;I ) . " M . R euss cites the title of the apocryphal gospel eva"/'Y, KaTa llfrpov. But it is very clear that the author who wished to pass this gospel under the name of Peter sought to ascribe the compila­ tion of it to the apostle, and so gave to the word, according to, the same meaning as we do. As to the well-known phrases, -eVa"fY, Ka-ra TOV<; Soot. a'TT'O

ACH evangelist enters upon his subject in the way which E corresponds best to the spirit of his nanative. Matthew, whose purpose is to demonstrate the right of Jesus to the theocratic throne, begins with His genealogy. Mark, who compiles memorabilia, throws himself without exordium in mediam rem. Luke, who pul'poses to write a history pro­ perly so called, gives account to his readers of his sources, aim, and method. The prologue of John ought to be equally in keeping with the general viewpoint of his narrative. But to determine this relation requires the profound study of that remarkable piece which more than any other passage of our holy books, perhaps, has exercised a decisive influence on the conception of Christianity in the church down to our own day. How far does the prologue extend? Only to ver. 5, answers M. Reuss. According to this view, the narrative would begin at ver. 6: "There was a man whose name was John." This mention of the birth of John the Baptist would be followed at ver. 14 by the mention of the incarnation of the Word; then the reference to the ministry of John the Baptist (ver. 19) would bring the narrative down to the beginning of the ministry of Jesus Christ (ver. 35). But a glance at vv. 15 and 16-18 is enough to prove that this arrangement does not at all correspond with the thought of the evangelist. The testimony of John the Baptist recorded at ver. 15 comes in on this supposition either too late (comp. vv. 6-8) or too soon (comp. ver. 19 et seq.). More than that, it would form an intolerable tautology with the double repeti­ tion of the same saying in vv. 27 and 30. It is in the two latter passages that the declaration of the forerunner is placed in its historical position,-that it is, properly speaking, nar- 326 CHAP. L 1-18. 327 rated. In the first, it is simply quoted, and that from an entirely different point of view from that of histGry, with a didactic aim. The dogmatical or religious reflections contained in vv. 16-18 would be equally out of place if the narrative had already begun. Finally, ver. 18 : " The only-begotten Son whieh is in the bosorn of the Father" •.., so evidently forms the pendant of ver. 1, that we must recognise in it the closing of the cycle opened at ver. 1. The narrative, then, does not begin till ver. 19, and vv. 1-18 form a whole of a particular kind. Is there a plan in this prologue 1 Or does it only contain a metaphysical lucubration or a pious effusion, without any definite course or rational progress f Lucke and some modems maintain two parts: 1. Vv. 1-5. The primordial existence of the Logos. 2. Vv. 6-18. His historical appearance. In this way the coming of Ohrif.,t in the flesh would undoubtedly be mentioned twice at vv. 11 and 14; but as it is taken up, it is said, more profoundly the second time than the first, there is no repetition properly so called. This reply, it must be confessed, is somewhat subtle. Olshausen and Lange maintain three sections: 1. Vv. 1-5. The p1-imordial activity of the Logos. 2. Vv. 6-13. His activity unrler the Old Testament. 3. Vv. 14-18. His incarna­ tion and activity in the ehureh. In this way the order of historical progress would be rigorously observed by the evan­ gelist. But the point in question is, whether this plan is compatible with the expressions of which he makes use, par­ ticularly whether the words of vv. 11-13 really allows us to apply this passage to the time of the Old Testament. Luthardt and Hengstenberg contend, not for chronological sections, but for concentric cycles, reproducing, when taken together, a summary of the Gospel history, each time with some new development. 1. Vv. 1-5. The summary of the activity of Christ, comprehending His coming in the flesh, and the general ill success of His ministry. 2. Vv. 6-13. The same history, with special mention of the forerunner and the delineation of Jewish incredulity. 3. Vv. 14-18. The same fact once more, but presented more specially from the stand­ point of the blessings it brings to believers.-The study of the details is the only thing which can furnish us with the means of appreciating this plan. PROLOGUE.

Hoelemann, in a little work fnll of erudition, De evangtlii joh. introitu, etc., Leipsic 1855, has endeavoured to trace tha plan of the prologue by following out, in a more thoroughgoing way than is ordinarily done, the parallelism between this piece and the first chapter of Genesis. He succeeds perfectly in the outset. But when he seeks to bring into correspondence the words: " The light shineth in darkness" (ver. 5), with the sepa­ ration of the light from the darkness (Gen. i. 4) ; or these: "There was a 1nan" ... (ver. 6), with the creation of man (Gen. i. 2 6) ; or when he comes to seek the explanation of the saying: " This was the true Light" (ver. 9), in an allusion to the appear­ ance of the sun on the fourth day (Gen. i. 16),-it is impossible to follow him in his subtilties ; and such exaggeration makes us the more admire the wisdom of the evangelist, who, aftCJ proceeding for a little in a line parallel with Moses, knew hi!! time for stopping short.

In all the proposed divisions, it will be seen that t,he first four or five verses form a first section. The general theme of t,his passage is evidently the Logos, His existence, and Hi~ activity previously to the incarnation. The last words o1 ver. 5: "The darkness comprehended it not," clearly form thP transition to a new idea, the rejection of the Word from thP bosom of humanity. This second idea reaches its culmination and limit in ver. 11 : " He came unto His own, and His own received Him not." Here begins a contrast precisely -marked by SJ (but), the only adversative particle of the prologue; whence, accordingly, we have the point of departure for a third idea,-that of faith in the Logos, indicated at the beginning by the first words of ver. 12 : "But to them who received Him." The development of this idea extends to the end of the pro­ logue. Thus, then, the Word, unbelief, and faith, such appears to us to be the plan of the piece. The interpretation of tho details ·will show whether this view of the whole corresponds to the thought of the evangelist. We defer to the close of the prologue the study of the general questions bearing upon it. CHAP. I. 1, 329

FIRST SECTION.

VV. 1-4.-THE LOGOS,

The allusion to the beginning of Genesis in the first verses -of our Gospel, is obvious at a glance. But John does not stop at that beginning which Moses made the point of departure. He ascends still higher. Why so 1 Because his aim is more remote than his predecessor's. To reach further, one must start higher. The Jewish historian had immediately in view only the development of the theocracy; the evangelist's ,aim is the second creation-Redemption. , For him the begin­ ning of Moses does not suffice. He must plunge into eternity to find there the agent of the work which he proposes to -describe. He starts from the same point as Moses, the apx1, the beginning of the world and of time ; but instead of proceed­ ing onward, he goes backward. He seeks in God Himself the -subject of his history-the Word (ver. 1); having found Him, -he takes his place with Hirn again at the beginning of things (ver. 2), and so again descends the stream of time. He brings before our eyes, first, the act of creation (ver. 3); then the normal and primitive state of humanity (ver. 4) ; and that while continuing to make the Logos the sole subject of his ·narrative. Ver. 1. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." 1-If it is indisputable that the phrase : in the beginning, contains a reflective allusion to Bereschith, the first word of Genesis, it follows that it refers to the time of creation. Some modern expositors (Olshausen, -de Wette, Meyer) apply it to eternity, in so far as it is the origin of time. Meyer quotes Prov. viii. 2 3 : e11 apxfi 7rpO "T"OV T~V ,yijv 'TT'oifja-ai, "f1·om the beginning, or ever the earth was." With still more probability we may quote 1 John i. 1 : "1'hat which was from the beginning," and Rev. iii. 14, where Jesus is called: "The beginning (the principle) of the creation '°f God." Nevertheless, the sense beginning may be maintained in the first two passages ; and from the fact that principle is the only meaning applicable in the third, it does not follow 1 Land Gregory of Nyssa read• before e •.,. 830 PROLOGUE. [sro. L that it should be applied here, where the word beginning ia used absolutely (without addition), and has nothing else to determine it than its parallelism with the well-known opening of Genesis. Ver. 2, at which St. John, after having plunged into the eternal order, again returns to this point of the begin­ ning to relate the act of creation (ver. 3), proves that the meaning which we prefer is really that which corresponds to his thought.-As to the significations " Eternal Father," or " Divine Wisdom," given by some Fathers (Origen, Cyril of Alexandria), or "beginning of the preaching of the Gospel," P.ssayed by the Socinians, they are no longer maintained by any one. But if the notion of eternity is not contained in the­ word beginning, it arises from its relation to the verb was. " In the beginning was the Word," signifies that when every­ thing began it did not begin ; it was there already anterior to all created things, and to time itself, which is only the space wherein created things are developed. Now, what is anterior to time belongs to the order of eternity. Thus the argument by which M. Reuss (Histoire de la theol. chret., t. ii p. 439) seeks to prove that the absolute eternity of the Word is not contained in John's words, falls to the ground. "If," says he, " the in the beginning of the fourth Gospel establishes the absolute eternity of the Word, the in the beginning of Genesis will establish the fl.bsolute eternity of the world." By no· means ; for the relation of the words in the beginning to the imperfect was in John, is entirely different from the relation of the in the beginning of Moses to the perfect created (Gen. i. 1). In the former case, the beginning is a special point of time which emerges on the permanent basis of the was; in the other, the beginning coincides with the instantaneous act: . God created.-As to the term Logos ( Word), it must neces­ sarily, in this context, contain an allusion to the history in Genesis. Eight times in the narrative of creation there occur, like the refrain of a hymn, the words: ".And God said." John gathers up all those sayings of God into a single saying, living and endowed with activity and intelli­ gence, from which all divine orders emanate ; he finds as the basis of all spoken words the speaking Word. Those resound 111 time ; this is above time. This parallelism with Genesis would suffice to set aside the meaning of r1w1on, which some- SEC. L] CHAP. L 1. 331 theologians of modern times have attempted to give to the word Logos, as if it were meant to designate the consciousntss which God has of Himself. This rag of Hegelian logic does not suit the text of the evangelist. The word Logos means reason, only in the language of philosophy ; in the New Testa. ment, it never signifies anything else than word-reason as it expresses itself in discourse. Theodore Beza thought that X67or;, word, might signify here o Xe,y6µ,evor;, the Promised One, the personage announced by the prophets. This impossible inter• pretation has been presented most recently in a somewhat less intolerable form by Hofmann and Luthardt : the Gospel preached to humanity, of which Christ is the essence; the evangelic message personified in Jesus. But let the attempt be made to apply this meaning in ver. 14: "The subject of the evangelic revelation was made flesh;" or in ver. 2: "The subject of gospel preaching was in the beginning with God : " All Luthardt's efforts have not succeeded in removing the forced character of this meaning. Again, it has been sought to give to the word Logos a.n active signification. Schleussner explains it as o "/J.ryruv auctor ; -roii Xo,yov, the preacher of the Gospel. But then, instead of a striking contrast, the term would become only a cold tautology in the saying, " The Word was made flesh I" The only form in which this explanation can be seriously discussed, is that given by Neander (Gesch. der Pflanzung, etc., 3d ed. t. ii. p. 6 8 9) : the eternal revealer of the divine being. There is in the divine essence a principle by which God reveals Himself, the Logos, and a principle by which He com• municates Himself, the Spirit. It is the former which is at work in the divine saying, Gen. i., as well as in all the theophanies and prophetic revelations of the Old Testament. It is the same which is the subject of the gospel history. We shall see how far this idea suffices to explain the different propositions of John regarding the Logos. The three propositions of this verse are brief, having a deeply marked character like oracles. The first indicates, as we have just seen, the eternity of the Logos ; the second expresses profoundly the idea of His personality. Such, indeed, is the meaning of the words 7rp6r; -r6v Be6v, with God, which could not well be rendered, as it seems to us, either by 332 PROLOGUE. [SEC. L one or other of the recently proposed translations : toward God (Astie), or : in the presence of God (Bonnet, Arnaud, Ril­ liet). The first is not English, the second is not exact. The latter would correspond to the entirely different expression, 1rapa Ttp (fjJE

1 D and some Fathers and Gnostics read ,u;., instead of ou3, "· The Gnostics Hemcleon, Ptolemreus, and others, the Alex. Fathers, Clem., Or., as well a; CD L, It. Vulg., put a point after ., and connect• r•-r•m as subject with the following phrase. CHAP. I. 8. 335 mined totality (2 Cor. v. 18), while the first is necessarily unlimited. The word 'Y{vea-0ai, to become, indicates the pas­ sage from nothingness to being, and forms a direct contrast to the was of vv. 1 and 2. Comp. the similar antithesis, viii. 5 8 : "Bef01·e Ab1·aham was (came into being), I am." It is the con­ trast between the two orders-the temporal and eternal. The part of the Logos is designated by oia, by. This preposition -does not lower the Word to the rank of a simple instrument; it is often applied to God Himself (Rom. xi. 36; Gal. i. 1; Heb. ii. 10). But it limits His part so as to leave place for a relation between God and the world, different from that of the Logos. This relation is not mentioned here ; but it is -expressed by St. Paul, 1 Cor. viii. 6, by the prepositions EK, of, and el,;, for: " To us there is but one God, the Fathe,·, of whom -are all things, and we for Him." Paul adds, in perfect con­ formity with our passage: "And one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom (o,' ov) are all things, and we by Him (oi' avrov)." Every being, to reach existence, must have passed through the thought and will of the Logos. But He Himself draws every­ thing from the Father, and refers everything to the Father. This limitation of the part done by the Word was already implied in the words: with God (vv. 1 and 2). Since there is ~ommunity of action, there is distinction of office. The second proposition of the verse, while repeating the .same in a negative form, is intended to exclude all exception. The words, without Him, forcibly declare the entire com­ munity expressed above between God and the Logos,-the " let us make" of Genesis. Some modems-Lucke, Olshausen, de Wette, and Baumlein-think that by the words, not any­ thing, John means to set aside the Platonic idea of eternal matter ((iAiYJ). But, first, matter would not be a iv; rather it is the undetermined condition of every particular being; and, -second, matter in the ancient sense is not a "fE"fovo<;, a thing which has become; John's expression would therefore not apply. It is more arbitrary still to ascribe to the apostle here, with Scholten, the notion of an eternal matter from which the Logos derived the world. Where in the text is there to be found a trac~ of such an idea ? In general, tb e apostle does not philosophise ; his sole aim is to exhibit the .:oupreme grandeur of the being who is to accomplish the work oJ6 PROLOGUE. [SEC. L of our redemption; He who becomes our Saviour was the· divine partner in the work of creation. Every being, even the tiniest insect and the smallest blade of grass, took their origin through His mediation, and bear the mark of His wisdom and power. In our translation we have connected the words & ryEryovev, that which exists, with the preceding proposition, and not with the phrase following. This is the prevalent inter­ pretation since the time of Ohrysostom. The exegesis of ver. 4 will justify this exposition. It was probably the apparent tautology of the words iry6veTo, took origin, and &

1 N D Jtplarique Syr<11• read ,,, .. ,. instead of~•- ! B omits in the text .-.. , ,,_,~,.,.,.,,,, (supplied on the margin), SEC. LJ CHAP. L 4. 337

the life," but as we have done : "In Him was life." Life, not for the Word Himself,-for the description of the Word in His essence is finished, and this idea would bring us back to ver. 3, -but for the universe created by Him. There is a gradation from the by Him, ver. 3, which referred to the creative act, to the in Him (ver. 4). This last expression means that the world, after having passed from nothingness to being by the power of the Word, continued to draw from Him the vivifying forces necessary for its preservation and progress. After having been the root of the tree, the Logos was also its sap. The term life is understood by Calvin and other interpreters as referring to the physical preservation of things in the sense in which it is used by Paul, Acts xvii. 28: "In God we live and move and have ou1· being." Others, like Lampe, Hengstenberg, etc., apply it to spiritual and eternal life. The distinction does not appear to us applicable to this passage; {;w,j, life, denotes here existence in its full state of prosperity, in its normal expansion. Now, for certain beings, the normal development of existence is limited to physical life ; for others, it rises to intellectual and moral life ; the latter may even become capable of receiving supernatural or eternal life. '' In union with the creative Word, John means to say there was life, full life, the perfect development of existence, for each being according to its measure, and consequently also for the whole." This idea of life, taken with that of creation (ver. 3), forms a gradation corresponding to that which we have remarked between in Him (ver. 4) and by Him (ver. 3). Does the imperf. was refer to a real period of history, and to which 1 Bruckner and Hengstenberg see in it only the expression of an ideal possibility. The former: If man had continued in union with the Word, the Word would have been his life. The latter : The Word alone could give life, so that, till the coming of Christ, the creature was debarred from access to spiritual life. Undoubtedly this interpretation is not wholly devoid of truth ; it is the ideal relation between the Word and humanity which is described in this verse. But if this rela­ tion had never begun at least to be realized, John could not have expressed himself as he does here. Such a purely hypothetical sense would not be in harmony either with the force of the imperfect, which denotes a real point in a period GODET. Y JOHN. 338 PROLOGIJE. [SEO. L of indefinite duration, or with the historical character of all the preceding verbs. These words, therefore, necessarily refer, according to John's view, to a real period of history. Now, from the connection of ver. 4 with ver. 3, this period can be no other than that which immediately succeeded the act of creation. The subject in question, therefore, is that first spring-time during which the Word, meeting as yet with no obstacle in the universe, could make it fruitful by communi­ cating to it, according to the capacity of each of those beings which composed it, the riches of His own life. This magni­ ficent starting-point in a development soon broken revealed the normal state, the essential relation. The normal state described in the first proposition found its highest expression in the being who was the masterpiece of creation, viz. man. In this privileged creature, made in the image of the Word Himself, life developed in the form of light.-The word light, according to Calvin and others, denotes understanding, that characteristic which distinguishes man from the lower animals ; according to Hengstenberg, on the contrary, it is salvation; Luthardt would make it holiness. The first meaning does not answer to the fulness of John's language; when he says: "God is light" (1 John i. 5), he certainly does not mean : " God is reason." Salvation is undoubtedly set forth in Scripture under the emblem of light ; but neither does this meaning apply, for it would here lead to a complete tautology with the term life. The meaning holi­ ness is equally defective, because it is impossible to exclude from the term light the element of knowledge. This pro­ found word appears to us to denote, in the language of John, the knowledge of moral good, or moral good fully conscious of itself in the living beings who realize it. The word truth in John expresses the same thing without a figure. Light, thus understood, is accessible to no being on the earth except man, the one being endowed with the inner organ necessary to per­ ceive moral good. That organ, originally one, but now divided, is the sense which we call conscience and reason. This light did not emanate directly from the Word: it pro­ ceeded from life, that life which man derived from the Word. For as bodily sight is one of the functions of physical life, so, in the normal state, sphitual light is an emanation from moral hEC. II.] CHAP. 1. 5-il. 339 life. The Logos is light; but it is through the mediation of life that. He must become so always; this is precisely the relation which the gospel restores. We recover, through the new creation in Jesus Christ, an inner light which springs up from the life, and which gains in clearness in proportion as the moral life grows in intensity. This idea is forcibly expressed by the article 7J, the, which John introduces in the second member before the word life. In communion with the Word there was life, normal existence for the world ; and from that universal life there sprang up light in man (by vocation the being of light). Our Lord meant nothing else when He described the pure heart as the organ which sees God (Matt. v. 8). In such a context is it not natural, whatever Meyer may say, to see in the two words : life and light, and in the rela­ tion which John establishes between them, an allusion to the tree of life and to that of knowledge '? After having eaten of the former, man would have been called to feed on the second. .John initiates us into the real essence of those primordial and mysterious facts, and gives us in this verse, as it were, the philosophy of paradise.-Some interpreters have applied ver. 4 to the action of the Logos in the midst of the theo­ cratic people by means of prophecy. But the words Twv av0pw1rwv, of men, demand for the passage a universal human application. The two imperfects, was, by placing in the past, and to some extent in the ideal sphere, the vivifying and light-giving communication of the Logos, already awake the suspicion that the present reality no longer corresponds to that normal relation. This comes out more clearly still from ver. 5, which forms the transition between the preceding sec­ tion and that which follows. The latter treats of the unbelief of humanity in regard to the Logos, who reveals Himself to mankind.

SECOND SECTION.

VV. 5-11.-UNBELIEF.

The fact of unbelief is indicated summarily in ver. 5. Then John relates the extraordinary provision which God made for its prevention, the sending of the forenmner, vv. 6-8 340 PROLOGUE. [SEC. H.

Finally, he describes the fact itself in such a way as to unveil its enormity, vv. 9-11. Ver. s: "And the light sliineth in darkness; and the dark­ ness comprehended it not." 1 -What then is this •darkness (u,cor{a) which all at once covers the scene of the world created and enlightened by the Word ? It is impossible, with some commentators of Baur's school, to take it for eternal darkness, a kingdom 0£ evil co-eternal with that of good. Ver. 3 is expressly opposed to this view: all that is, without exception, is the work of the Logos. But John, as shown by vv. 3 and 4, wrote for readers who knew the narrative of Genesis. We must still follow this narrative in explaining ver. 5. The darkness of which the evangelist speaks is the subjection to sin and falsehood under which mankind lives in consequence of the £act 0£ the £all related in Gen. iii. As the Logos was the principle of life and light for the world, as soon as mankind ceased to live in Him·, (ver. 3), moral obscurity invaded it; there was darknesr;.­ The Logos nevertheless perseveres in His office 0£ enlightener (ver. 4), and concludes by Himself appearing on the theatre which he never ceased to illumine. Formerly I referred the present a[vei), can only from the con­ text apply to the gospel era, and thus determines the meaning· 0£ the identical expressior. of the prologue. 3. The really ' B. and five Mnn. read ,,..,,,., (the Logos) instl'ad of ,w.-• (t.he light), :,EC. II.] CHAP. L 6. 341

fav (to attain to wisdom). I rest only on the passages in which the verb is used, as here, in the active. The meaning of comprehending, which it takes in the middle (Acts iv. 13, x. 34; Eph. iii. 18), rests also on the meaning of the verb which we advocate here. John therefore means that the darkness did not sufter itself to be penetrated by the light which shone to scatter it. To understand this somewhat strange image, it must be remem­ bered that the word darkness does not here denote an abstract, principle, but living and free beings, corrupt humanity. Understood in this sense, the second proposition is the sum­ mary developed in the following passage, vv. 6-11 ; it has its counterpart in the second proposition of ver. 11. The choice of the somewhat different term 'Tt"aphaf)ev, welcomed (ver. 11), to express nearly the same idea as the KaTeXaf)ev of ver. 5, will be easily understood. The Kat, and, which connects this proposition with the former one, takes the place of a Se, but, as it often does. John presents the course of things, not from the view-point of man's changing conduct toward God, but from that of the faithful and persevering conduct of the Logos toward man.-The aor. f€aTeXa/3ev rises on the background of the present aivei as one particular and solitary act, an attitude taken once for all. In the eyes of the evangelist the refusal of the mass of mankind to allow them­ selves to be enlightened by the gospel is already an accomplished fact; comp. the saying of Jesus, iii. 19, which is the text, as it were, from which John has taken this: "Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil."-The apostle now goes on to narrate the manner in which the decisive moral fact expressed in ver. 5, and as it is consummated in Israel, took place. And to impress its gravity, he begins with relating the extraordinary measure which God took to render it, as it seemed, impossible, VY. 6-8. Ver. 6. " There was (appeared) a mctn sent frnm God, whose 344 PROLOGUE, [SEC. ll name was Jokn."-It seemed as if the divinely accredited fore­ runner must have rendered impossible that unbelief in the Logos which was about to follow.-The term l'"f€VeTo, beeame, appeared, denotes a historical appearance, thus forming a con­ trast - is it intentional ? - with the verb ~v, was, which denoted the eternal existence of the Word. It is the same with the word IJ,v0poo7ro<;, a man, which forms an antithesis to the divine subject, which is as yet the only one on the scene. The analytic form, e1::veTo &v0poo7ror; a7reum),.,µlvor;, is not a simple periphrasis of a7T€

,differs from the verb l,yfvero, appea1·ed, ver. 6, inasmuch as the latter applied to the birth of John, while the former denotes his entrance upon public life.-The part of witness has such :importance in the eyes of the evangelist, that he presents it in two ways; first, without government: a.s a witness, or (more literally) for witness-bearing; the second time, by indicating the subject of the testimony. The first expression exhibits the {Jharacteristic of witness in itself, in opposition to the more >€minent person who is to follow. The second completes the notion of his witness-bearing. This idea of witness-bearing is one of the fundamental notions -0f our Gospel It is inseparable from that of faith, and cor- 1relative with it. Witness-bearing is rendered with a view to faith, and faith is only possible in virtue of witness-bearing. There is no faith worthy of the name except that which is -fixed on a divine testimony rendered either in act or in word. Witness-bearing resembles the vigorous trunk of the oak; faith, the slender twig which embraces the trunk and makes it its support. But did the light need to be attested, indicated, -demonstrated 1 Is not the sun its own proof? If the Word had appeared here below in the glory which is peculiar to Him (the form of God, Phil ii. 6), the sending of a witness would not have been necessary. But He must appear en­ Yeloped in a thick veil (the flesh, ver. 14). In the state of blindness into which sin has plunged man, he cannot discern Him under this form except by means of some testimony. "To bear witness to the Light," says John, " that all through him might believe," -evidently, believe on Christ through John the Baptist, and not on God through Christ (Grotius, Ewald, etc.).-The matter in question in this verse is not the part of Christ, but that of John.-When some modem critics accuse one another of agreeing with the Gnostics in setting up two kinds of men of opposite natures, origins, and destinies, the psychical and the pneumatical, they seem to forget the words : " that all through him might believe."-As at ver. 3 John had coupled his affirmation with a negation to sweep away ,expressly every notion contrary to the truth affirmed, so he -0.oes here: Ver. 8. "He was not the Light, but was sent to bear witness .of tlw Light."-The emphasis is not, as Meyer thinks, on the "Verbal idea: "He was not the Light, but only a witness." The 346 PlWLOGUE. [SEC. IL emphasis is on the subject (Luthardt) : "It was not he who, was the Light, but another (ver. 9)." Hence the choice of the­ pronoun €K€'ivo~, substituted for the olno<; of ver. 7. The latter has only an affirmative force; the former has always in John something of stronger emphasis, and even exclusiveness.-The rva, in order that, depends, according to Meyer, on an under­ stood rjX0€ (came), or is, according to Luthardt, independent of any verb, as is often the case in John (ix. 3, xiii. 18, xv. ::l 5). But this independence can never be more than apparent,-an aim must depend on some action. And if it is hardly natural to go so far back as the verb 1JA0€, came (Meyer), there is nothing to prevent us from using the verb fJV, was, strengthen­ ing its meaning a little : " was there " ( aderat), and making it the point of support for the in order to. It can hardly be admitted, I think, that in this verse John means only to give expression to the feeling which he had of the absolute superiority of Jesus to John the Baptist (Meyer,_ Hengstenberg). The emphatic negative form of ver. 8, and the analogous passages, i. 20, iii. 25 et seq., compared with Acts xiii. 25, and with the remarkable fact related, Acts xix. 3, 4, lead us to suppose a polemical intention against parties who attributed to the forerunner the dignity of the Messiah (comp. Introd. p. 293). John's testimony should have opened the door of faith to all, and rendered unbelief impossible. And yet the impossible was realized, and that, too, in the most monstrous form. This is the fact which is developed in vv. 9-11. Ver. 9. "The true light which lighteth every man came into the world."-I must, I believe, finally abide by this inter­ pretation, making the participle epxoµevov, coming, the attribute of the verb f)v, was; was coming, for: came. This analytic form involves an idea of duration. At the time when John was testifying of the light, it was on the way; it was just coming ; so Bengel, Liicke, de Wette, Weiss, Westcott. The verse thns understood leaves the phrase coming into the world the usual and almost technical sense which it has in John (iii. 19, vi. 14, ix. 39, xviii. 37, etc.). Some commentators,. while supporting the same construction, refer the term came into the world to the long coming of the Logos through the­ ages, by means of His revelations during the whole course of: t-EC. II.] CHAP. I. 9, 34'7 the Old Testament (Keim, Westcott). But this meaning would lead, as we shall see, to a tautology with the first pro­ position of the following verse. Other meanings given to ~v epx6µevov (by Tholuck : " He was about to come;" by Luthardt: " He must needs come ") are far from natural.­ Meyer, with some ancient and modern commentators (Origen, Chrysostom, Calvin, Beza, etc.), advocates a wholly different construction ; he joins the epx6p,€vov to the substantive &v0p&'J'Trov : " which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." In that case To q>w<;, the light, is taken as the subject of ~v, which is translated in the sense of " was present" (aderat): "The true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, was present ; " or To cpro,; is made the attribute of ,jjv, by giving the subject of this verb a cpw,; understood to be taken from the preceding verse: "This light (to which John bore testimony, ver. 8) was the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." Against this connection of epx6µevov, coming, with the subst. every man, there has often been alleged the needless­ ness of this appendix which is understood of itself; but wrongly, as I have shown in the first edition, where I ad­ vocated this explanation. For the words thus understood would signify that the light of the Logos is a divine gift which every man brings with him at his birth, that it is therefore an innate light which is in question. Yet this idea is not lost in the other construction ; it reappears, though less clearly expressed, in the words : which lighteth every man. The two constructions of the ~v, whether in the sense of wa,; present, or understanding for it a subject taken from the previous verse, are not very natural. Finally, the logical connection with ver. 8 is closer in the former sense : John came to bear witness of the light (ver. 8); for at that very time the light was on the point of appearing in the world (ver. 9). In my second edition I had attempted a third or even fourth construction by joining the participle epx6µevov not to ,jjv, nor to i:1v0poYrrov, but to

It is one of the characteristic terms of John's style. Of twenty-eight passages in which it occurs in the New Testa­ ment, twenty-three belong to John; nine in his Gospel, four in his First Epistle, ten in the Apocalypse (Milligan). It is also used in the classics. It denotes the fact as the adequate realization of the idea. It therefore contrasts, not the true with the false, but the normal appearance with the imperfect realization. Consequently the light of which John speaks is thereby characterized as essential light, in opposition to all light of an inferior order. -The phrase : which li.ghteth every man, if it were applied to the gospel revelation, would denote the universal character of the gospel ; the present lighteth would be that of the idea. But it is more natural to find the same notion expressed here as in ver. 4 : the Logos, as .the inner light, enlightening every man, illuminating him with sublime intuitions of the good, the beautiful and the true.-The term every man once more gives a formal contra­ rliction to the assertion of Baur's school, which makes John a dualistic philosopher. The Logos when He came into the world did not arrive as a stranger. By profound and intimate relations with humanity, He had prepared for His advent and seemed to have made sure of a favourable welcome. Ver. 10. "He was in the world, and, the world was made by Him, and, the world knew Him not."-The first proposition forms a contrast to the last words of ver. 9 : "That Light, which cometh into the world, was already there." Here is the reproduction of the idea of ver. 4. Though the sin of man made a breach in the relations between the Word and the world, it did not banish Him from it. It is always in Hirn, that " all things live and move and have their being." It is difficult to understand how exegetes like de W ette, Meyer, and Astie could refer the words, He was in the world, to the presence of Jesus in Israel at the time when the forerunner was preaching ; and the last proposition, the world knew Him not, to the people's ignorance at that time of the presence of the Messiah (comp. ver. 2 6 : There standeth One among you whom ye know not). What proportion is there between a fact of so little importance, and the idea of the following propo­ sition, in which the Logos is described as the Creator of t'.le SEC. ll.] CHAP. t. 10. 849- world ! The declaration, and tke world was made by Him, necessarily impresses on the proposition which precedes and on that which follows a character of grandeur and sublimity incompatible with so accidental a fact. If, on the contrary, the words, He was in the world, relate to the invisible and universal presence of the Logos before His incarnation, it is easy to understand the relation between this idea and the following one : and the world was 'macle by Him. This second proposition recalls ver. 3 as the first does ver. 4. They form both of them a striking contrast to the third, which repro­ duces the idea of ver. 5. Intimate as were the previous relations between that true Light and the world which it came to enlighten, the world knew Him not. It had been created by Him ; He filled it, a& the spirit of an artist fills his work; and yet when He came it did not recognise Him. The ,ea£, and, which connects the third proposition with the two others, undoubtedly ex­ presses a contrast, but imparting to it at the same time a progressive character. The work of the Logos continues ; nothing disturbs His course ; comp. the similar and of ver. 5. Let us remark here for the first time a peculiarity in the style uf our evangelist. He loves the paratactical (by way of juxtaposition) construction so familiar to the Hebrews, and employs it instead of the syntactical conjunction of proposi­ tions, which corresponds to the genius of the Greek language. Instead of saying, " He was ... and the world ... and the world " ... , a writer of Greek origin would have expressed himself thus : " Although He was ... and though the world was made . . . the world knew Him not." The words : ov1C ~v"', knew Him not, in connection with the first proposition, might certainly, notwithstanding our explanation of ver. 5, refer to the ignorance of the world in general in regard to the inner revelation of the Logos anterior to His coming in the flesh ; comp. 1 Cor. i. 21 : " After that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God ...," and Rom. i. 19-21. The unbelief of the Jews, ver. 11, would in this case stand out as an exceptional fact on the general background of human blindness. In that case we must translate : " Had not known Rim." But if Paul is justified in charging the Gentiles with not having known God, could they be charged with not having 350 PROLOGUE. [SEC. II. recognised the Logos? It is therefore more natural to apply the knew not of ver. 10 to the same fact to which we have referred the comprehended not of ver. 5, to the rejection of the Light which appeared in Christ on the stage of history. The word ,eaTaAaµ,/3aveiv, seize, ver. 5, suited the Logos regarded as a luminousprinciple (ah6,neuter); the word know, discern, ver. 10, applies better to the Logos regarded in the light in which He appears here as a person (auT6v, masculine). We seize a principle,-we discern a person. The ,eorrµo~, world, is here humanity blinded by sin, the darkness of ver. 5. It will be seen that our ver. 10 sums up vv. 3-5, with the view of preparing for the description of the final cata­ strophe, ver. 11. In this verse there is indicated more ex­ pressly the agent by whose instrumentality the sinful world consummated this fatal act. Ver. 11. "He came into His own (dwdling-place), and His own received Him not." If the knew Him not of ver. 10 were applied to the rejection of the inward illumination of the Logos, this ver. 11 would form a climax to the third proposi­ tion of ver. 10 : " There was something worse still ! " But it is better, and it is the natural form of the M!Jndeton between vv. 10 and 11, to regard this last verse as a more emphatic repetition of the same fact as is indicated in the preceding. The expression passes from the abstract to the thoroughly historical and concrete form; and that in order to exhibit the full enormity of the fact.-The word 'Y)A0e, came, denotes an external manifestation, in opposition to the was of ver. 10, which expressed only an invisible presence. This came refers back to the lpxoµevov, coming into the world, of ver. 9. To l8ta, literally, His home (comp. xix. 27). Before coming down to the earth, the Logos had prepared for Himself a dwelling-place which belonged to Him peculiarly, and which should have been as it were His door of entrance into the world. Comp. Ex. xix. 5, where Jehovah says to the Jews, " Ye shall be my peculiar treasure among all peoples ; '• and Ps. cxxxv. 4: " The Lord hath chosen Jacob." Malachi had said of Christ, while describing His final appearing, His Messianic advent: "The Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to His temple; behold, He shall come" (iii 1). But this door was closed against Him, and that by those very men wh0 "SBC. II.] 351

should have opened it to Him : oi l8iot, His own, His ser­ vants, the dwellers in His house, whom He had Himself ~stablished in it. Ta f8ia, His dwelling-place, was Canaan, with its entire theocratic institutions ; oi fowt, Jilis own, are the members of the Israelitish nation. So Paul calls them in 1ike manner olH:e'iot, members of the household, domestici, jami­ liares, in opposition to the ~lvot and 7rapoiKoi, strangers and pilgrims, terms by which he denotes the Gentiles (Eph. ii. 19). Never, it seems, had the Jews better deserved this name of honour from Jehovah than when Jesus appeared. Their monotheistic zeal and aversion to idolatry had then reached their culminating point. The nation in general seemed to form a Messianic community, fully disposed to receive " Him . who was to come," as a bride welcomes her bridegroom.-The word 7rapa"li.aµf]avew, to 1·eceive to one's house, perfectly ex­ presses the nature of that welcome which the Messiah had a right to expect. It should have been a national, solemn, and official acknowledgment on the part of the entire nation, hailing its Messiah, and rendering homage to its God. If the abode prepared had opened in this way, it would immediately have become the starting-point for the conquest of the world (Ps. ex. 2, 3). Instead, an unheard of event took place. In Agamemnon returning to his palace after ten years' absence, and falling by the hand of his unfaithful spouse, we have the event which is tragical par excellence in pagan history. But what is that outrage when compared with the theocratic tragedy ? The God invoked by the nation appears in His temple, and is crucified by His own worshippers !-Observe the finely-shaded difference between the two compounds, H:aTa­ XaµfJavew, to apprehend, ver. 5, which suited the light viewed as a principle, and 7rapa"li.aµ/3aveiv, to welcome, which is the suitable term when the subject is the master of the house. On the Ka[, and, the same observation as at vv. 5 and 10. We feel that the heart of the writer is now calmly contem­ plating the poignant contrast contained in the two proposi­ tions of the verse. Two explanations have been offered, opposed to that which we have been developing. Some interpreters, as Lange, for -0xample, refer the coming of the Word in this verse to the munifestations of Jehovah and the prophetic revelations in 852 PROLOGUE, [SEC. Ill. the Old Testament. Others-M. Reuss, for example-apply the words, He came, as we do, to the historical manifestation, of Jesus Christ ; but, according to them, the foioi designate, not the Jews, but " men in general, as creatures of the pre­ existent Word" (Hist. de la {Mol. Okret. t. ii. p. 476). M. Reuss even describes the application of the words, Ta foia, ot fow,, to the Jews, as " a strange error of ordinary exegesis." As to the first opinion, it is incompatible with the word tjJ\,0e, He came, as well as with vv. 12 and 13, which can only relate to the effects of Christ's coming in the flesh. No one would have thought of giving another meaning to ver. 11, but for the apparent tautology which arises from it with ver. 14. This is a difficulty which we shall have to surmount. The­ other interpretation, that of M. Reuss, appears to him neces­ sary, because of a difficulty which he finds in the l5aot, all them who, of ver. 12, if by His own, ver. 11, the Jews are­ understood,-we shall examine this objection in its own place ; and next, because of the general fact that, according to our Gospel, " there are no peculiar relations between the Word and the Jews as such." We think, on the contrary, we can prove that the fourth Gospel, no less than the first, recognises the existence of an organic relation between the theocracy and the coming of Christ in the flesh. Comp. i 1 7 : " The law given by Moses" is followed by" grace and truth came by Jesus Ghrist,· " ii. 16, Jesus calls the temple " His Father's-­ house;" iv. 22: "Salvation is of the Jews;" v. 39 : "Thi! Scriptwres testify of me;" and, moreover, viii. 35, 56, x. 2, 3, xii. 41, xix. 36, 37. All these passages overthrow the assertion of M. Reuss, and justify the meaning which we have given, in keeping with the entire context~ to the expressions; Hi,s own (dwelling-place) and His own.

TH I RD S E C TI O N.

VV. 12-18.-FAITH,

Though the appearing of· the Word did not succeed in scattering the darkness of the human race and overcoming the resistance of Israel as a nation, His mission is by no· SEC. IIL] CHAP. I. 12. 353 means a failure. On the contrary, 1t is at this juncture that His relations to humanity become more intimate, and that a new humanity appears on the earth, begotten directly of God through the instrumentality of faith (vv. 12 and 13). The object of this faith, which has power to create a family of God's children here on earth, is the incarnation of the Word (ver. 14a). Extraordinary as this fact is, it is certain; for, 1 st. He was beheld with rapture by eye-witnesses, to the number of whom the author belongs (ver. 14b); 2d. He was pointed out by the divine herald, whose mission it was to pro­ claim Him (ver. 15) ; 3d. He was proved, and, as it were, lived on, by the whole church, which, by everything received from this unparalleled being, Jesus Christ, proves that He has the characteristics of the divine Logos (vv. 16-18). Hence the threefold testimony: that of eye-witnesses, that of the official witness, and that of the whole church. This third part of the prologue thus goes to demonstrate the certainty and riches of faith. Ver. 18 brings us, through the experience of believers, to that summit from which we gradually descended after ver. 1. The church possesses in Jesus that eternal Word,-that Word-God, with whose exist­ ence the prologue opened. Ver. 12. "But 1 as many as received Him, to them gave He· ZJOWe?' to become the sons of God, to them that believe on His name." Ae, but, expresses not only gradation, but opposition. This is proved, first, by the antithesis of tAaf)ov, received, to ov wape­ )..af)ov, received not (ver. 11) ; and it appears also from the contrast between l5crni, literally: as many of them as then are who, and oi lowi, His own (ver. 11). This latter name de­ noted the nation as a whole ; the pronoun l5uoi denotes only individuals. By its official representatives, the nation, as such, refused to welcome Jesus. From that time faith took a purely individual and, so to speak, sporadic character. This is expressed by the pronoun oa-oi, all those who. Nay, more, in proportion as faith in the Messiah was detached from all identification with the Jewish nation as such, access to this faith was opened up to every human being. This is that impoverishment of Israel which, as St. Paul says (Rom. xi.), has formed the riches of the Gentiles. The iJuoi are there-

1 ~• is omitted by D and some Fathers. GODET. z JOHN. Plto;:,oGUE, [SEC. JIL fore not only those from among the Jews who have not sharerl the national unbelief, but all believers in general (ro,s- 'ITUT­ revou, all we. Thus is resolved the dilemma by which M. Reuss (Hist. de la {heal. Ohret. t. ii. p. 4 7 5) thinks he can prove that the words His own (dwelling­ place), His own people (ver. 11), designate men in general, and not Jews. If they were Jews, he alleges, the all those of ver. 12, who are contrasted with the His own of ver. 11, would be either Gentiles-and we should be led to the assertion that Gentiles alone believed-or the Jews who believed ex­ ceptionally, and we should be forced to conclude that there were no believers except Jews ! The error is in this latter conclusion. _The true inference to be drawn from this all those is, that the Messiah being once rejected by unbelieving Israel (that of ver. 11), there is henceforth in the human race, taken as a whole, only individual believers. This substitu­ tion of individual faith for the collective and national welcome of the chosen people, is the very reason why there is used in this verse the simple verb lMfJov, received, instead of the compound 7rape)wf3ov, welcomed (ver. 11). The compound had a certain grave or solemn character, which was in keep­ ing with an official reception, such as that of the Israelitish authorities receiving in the name of the whole theocratic nation its divine King, and bringing Rim into His palace, viz. the temple; while the simple )wµ,(3&vew, which signifies to take, to seize in passing, and, as it were, accidentally, is more in keeping with the notion of individual faith. In this verse, therefore, St. John, like St. Paul in all his Epistles, substitutes the great idea of Christian individualism, with its universal and human character, for Jewish nationalism, with the narrow particularism within which it was naturally confined. The antithesis between vv. 11 and 12 is dictated by the feeling of a grave contrast. The evangelist has not expressed the consequences of the tragical statement: "His own received Him not ; " but every one knows that for Israel they are temporal ruin and spiritual death. This results from the fact that the Logos rejected by them was the Life. But John SEC. III,] CHAP. I. 12. 355 desires to signalize the salutary and glorious consequences arising from the welcome given to the Word by individual believers of every nation. This divine guest conferred on those who received Him privileges that are worthy of Him. The apostle mentions two, the one of which is the condition of the other : a new position in relation to God, and in this new position participation in His perfect life. The word €{;ovu{a, authority, competency, can neither denote simple possibility, which is too little, nor power, which would be too much ; for the believer cannot make himself a .child o( God. What is meant is a new standing, granted to the believer, that of a reconciled or justified one, in virtue of which he can receive the 7rvevµa, the Spirit of God, which is in Him the principle of a divine life. By the possession of this life he becomes T€/CVOV eeov, a child of God. The expres­ sion includes more than the idea of adoption, Paul's vio0eula, which would rather correspond to the state of justification, the new standing denoted by €{;ovuta. The word -re,cvov, child, from -ril€Teiv, to beget, implies the actual communication of the life of God ; while the word vlor;, son, does not necessarily go beyond the idea of adoption, as a civil transaction, if one may so speak Comp. Gal. iv. 6 : " Because ye are sons, God hath sent jorth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts ;" a statement which amounts to saying: " Because ye are sons, viol (by adoption), God hath made you children (-re1Cva) by regenera­ tion." The because of Paul is precisely equivalent to the ,€f;ovula of John. How, with the word ,yeveu0ai, become, before his eyes, can Hilgenfeld venture to maintain that, according to the dualistic system of John, the children of God are such by nature, and before their acceptance of the histori­ cal Christ 1 The idea, child of God, in the concrete sense which it has here, is foreign to the Old Testament. There, the terms father and child, in the rare cases where they occur (Ps. ciii. 13 ; Isa. lxiii. 16 ; J er. xxxi. 2 0 ; Hos. xi. 1 ), express only the feelings of affection, tenderness, or compassion. This -Observation would suffice to set aside the explanation of ,exegetes who, like Lange, :i.ooking forward to ver. 14, refer vv. 12 and 13 to the faithful of the Old Testament. Expres­ :Sions so strong, applied to Israelitish saints, would be in 356 l'.tWLOGUE. [SEC. m. contradiction to the declaration of J esns, Matt. xi. 11, 12 ; they would not even be compatible with John i. 1 7 and vii. 39. To denote the welcome given to Jesus by individual be­ lievers, the apostle had used the figurative and consequently less precise term, receiving. But a notion so important. demanded an exact description; for the passage is an invita­ tion to the readers to appropriate to themselves the same­ privileges ; they must therefore know exactly in what way to do it. Hence the appendix: Tot~ '11'UTT€vourrw .••, to them that believe on His name. These words indicate with precision the­ mode of the l,.,aµ,/3avetv of individual reception. But instead of connecting them with the word D.a(3ov, received, which they explain, the author joins them to the pronoun avTo'i~, to them. " It is one of the peculiarities of John's sty le," observes Luthardt, " to describe the moral condition, by means of which an act is accomplished, by an explanatory appendix, added to one of the words which depend on the principal verb. As to style, this is perhaps clumsy; but as to expression of thought~ it is energetic. See the same construction, iii. 13, v. 18, vii. 5 0, etc." We have sought to give the force of this turn of expres­ sion in our translation [Fr.: because of their having believed]. But we have not been able to do so without a measure of violence to the emphasis. The relation between the two acts, receiving and believing, is evidently this: the second fully suffices for the realization of the first. But why is faith needed to receive the Word '? Because His divine character does not fall under the sense of sight. For a thick veil hides Him from our natural view. To discern Him, a spiritual act is necessary, an act of moral perception, accompanied by a sincere surrender to the Holy Being who is its object. Such is faith. The term by which John here expressed the object of faith is 8voµ,a, the name. This word, which occurs so frequently in Holy Scripture, may be understood in two ways. Either it denotes the entirety of the external signs and acts through which the person is revealed, itself remaining inaccessible to the senses ; so it is understood by Hengstenberg. Or, on the contrary, as we think, the term name is the adequate expression of the inmost essence of the being, in opposition to its external :SEC. Ill.] CHAP. I. 18. 357 manifestations. In this latter case, the name is not the name which men give, but that which the being bears in the judg­ ment of God, that which defines its true nature, its absolute name. The second meaning is the only one which is suit­ .able in a passage where the name is given as the object qf faith. The true name, which is not expressed here, is that of Logos, ver. 14, or Son, ver. 18. The apostle had de­ veloped the notion of receiving (in the last words of the verse), but not that of children of God; the latter he unfolds in ver. 1 :3. Ver. 1 :3. " Which were born, 1 not of blood, no1· of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."-The past, which were born, or, more literally, which were begotten, contains a difficulty. Is regeneration, then, anterior to faith (ver. 12) ? Meyer replies that the relative ot, who, does not depend on the last words, them that believe on His name, but on the principal -substantive: children of God, by a construction ad sensum (the masculine o't and the neuter reKva). .And, in fact, ver. 13 is -0nly the development, in a negative and positive form, of the idea : child of God. And first, in the negative form, by means of three cumulative phrases. Through their antithesis with the brief e,c 01:011, of God, which follows, they take a disdain­ ful or even contemptuous character. Does John mean thereby to stigmatize the false confidence of the Jews in thei1 theocratic sonship, in their title, Abraham's children? But would not the accumulation of three phras.es to express the idea of theocratic birth be superfluous ? And has not the prologue too high a flight, too universal a bearing, to admit of -so petty a polemic ? Does not John rather wish to exhibit here the contrast between the first and second creation? In conformity with the essentially different character of the two {;reations, there are two humanities : the one which is propa­ gated in the natural way, the other in which life proceeds from an immediate communication of God to each personality. It is therefore ordinary generation as the basis of natural humanity which John describes in the first three phrase:.;. 1 Iremeus quotes this passage thrice in the form: Qui natus est, etc., thus, Jtpplying the words to Christ Himself ; and Tertullian believes so strongly in the authenticity of this reading, that he ascribes the opposite reading, that oi -0ur text, to a falsification of Gnostic (Valentinian) origin. But the R9ceive,I 1·eading is found in all our critical documents, without exception. 358 PROLOGUE. [SEC. III.

There is a gradation. The first term : not of blood, defines procreation from the purely physical point of view ; blood is mentioned as the seat of natural life (Lev. xvii. 11). The­ plur. aiµ6,Trov has been explained, either by the duality of the.­ sexes or by the plurality of ancestors ; but it ought rather to be interpreted like the plur. ry&,>.agt, in the words of Plato (Leg. x. p. 887 D): iTt lv ryaXagt Tpe..aµ/3livetv, 1·eceiving), but in its object. The apostle ha

What could the expression possibly mean : " The Word became flesh," taken in the sense of "became body"? In reality, according to the view defended by Zeller, the Word .simply became the spirit animating a body, but did not Himself become body. John must have said: " He took a body." Moreover, how could Jesus speak (John xii. 27) of His soul, and of His soul as troubled? How (xi. 33 and xiii. 21) could it be said that He "groaned in His spirit," that He was "troubled in His spirit," which would signify, .according to Zeller's view, that Jesus groaned in the Logos! that He was troubled in the Logos! And when John relates, xix. 30, that Jesus gave up His spirit into the hands of His Father, that must signify that Jesus gave up the Logos into the hands of God l The evangelist could not write sucli .absurdities. Evidently, according to him, Jesus possessed, .along with a human body, a human soul and a human spirit. He was a whole man, and this is the meaning of the word: became flesh. The word flesh is not meant simply to denote the visibility or corporeity of Jesus (de Wette, Reuss, Baur), .and as little the poverty and weakness of His earthly mani­ festation (Olshausen, Tholuck). It denotes the completeness -of His human nature, in virtue of which He could suffer or enjoy happiness. be tempted, struggle, learn, make progress, love, pray, exactly like us; comp. Rom. viii. 3. The phrase l1v0prowor;; iry~vero, became man, would not have expressed this idea so exactly. It would have described Jesus as a deter­ minate human personality; but this personality might have reserved for Himself an exceptional position. This idea John wished to set aside, in order to assert the complete homo­ ·geneousness of His nature and mode of being with ours. The word "flesh" was the one which best suited this purpose. Moreover, Jesus called Himself man, &v0prowor;;, in the full sense of the word, John viii. 40; and the name which He -chose to give Himself above all others: the Son of man (i. 52 and elsewhere), implies this notion. It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that ·which is contained in the two words : "the Word," and "flesh." What notion will unite them, and thus fill up the gulf between them? It is the notion which is expressed by the verb -eyevE'TO, became. The natural meaning of this verb bewrne, when 362 PROLOGUE. [SEC. Ill. it has a substantive for its attribute, is certainly the trans­ formation of the subject's mode of existence ; comp. ii. 9 : "the water that was made wine (TO flowp 0!11011 'Y€"f€1J'T/µ,E11011)." Baur and Reuss refuse to apply the natural sense here. The one asserts that, according to our Gospel, the Word remains in full possession of all His divine attributes, and consequently does not become flesh, but clothes Himself with flesh as with an accidental covering. The second also maintains that, with John, " the incarnation is something accessory ;" that in thi& act "the Word loses absolutely nothing of what He possessed ; " that incarnation is an "exaltation in respect of humanity, but not a humiliation in respect of him" (v. ii. p. 456). This critic, however, is constrained by evidence to make the­ following admission : " There is nothing except the word became which positively affirms that when He came He changed the form of His existence " (p. 451 ). We must add : this word become, interpreted as it is by the evangelist himself in all the passages which we have just quoted, prove~ that the change goes to the very root of the mode of existence It is a curious fact that Protestant orthodoxy, whether­ Lutheran or Reformed, has also refused till now to accept the meaning of this word "became" in all its strictIJess. It is evaded, in the former case, by means of the theory of the communicatio idiomatum, in virtue of which the divine subject~ the Word, chose somehow at will, and at every moment, between the two modes of divine and human existence, transferring alternatively to the one the attributes of the other ; in the latter case, by asserting more strictly the distinction between the two modes of being, but placing them purely and simply in juxtaposition in the same subject. Neither the one nor the other of these views, which are, besides, open to so many objections from a theological standpoint, corresponds to the real meaning of the word " to become." The proposition : " The Word became flesh," can only, as it seems to me, signify one thing, viz. that the divine subject entered into the human mode of being at the cost of renouncing His divine mode of" being. The personal subject remained the same, but He exchanged the divine state for the human state; and if at a later time He recovers His divine state, it is not by aban­ c!oning the human,-He has too seriously appropriated it to 8EC. III.] CHAP. I. 14. 363

Himself,-but by exalting the latter to the height of the former. The contents of the proposition of John are not, therefore, two opposite states co-existing in the same subject, but: -a single subject passing from one mode of being to another, which He will gradually transform so as to render it in the end capable of possessing all the attributes of the former. John's teaching, thus understood, is in entire harmony with Paul's. This apostle says in substance, Phil. ii. 6-8 : " He who was in the form of God . . . He emptied (aneanti) Himself, having taken the form of a servant and become like to men ; " and 2 Cor. viii. 9 : " Though He was rich He became poor, that ye through His poverty might be made rich." These passages express, in a form completely independent of John's, the same identical conception : incarnation by deprivation (,cevru,nc;). We shall see that the whole gospel history, and especially the delineation of our Lord's person as drawn by John, notwithstanding all the assertions to the contrary made by M. Reuss, is fully at one with the theme of the prologue thus understood. Moreover, it is evident from the central proposition of the prologue, that John did not at all regard the Logos as an impersonal principle existing in the divine understanding, as Beyschlag views it, but as a living personality. "A principle," -says Meyer rightly," which is made flesh would be, as regards John, an impossible conception." Thus is confirmed the con­ clusion which we had .already drawn from the second proposi­ tion of ver. 1. The Word did not merely enter into human life ; He remained in it, and appropriated it completely to Himself; such is the meaning of the proposition following. The word J,nc1vruaf.V literally signifies, dwelt in his tent. Some critics (Meyer, Reuss, etc.) see an allusion here to a technical term in the religious philosophy of the later Jews, the word Shekinah (from t~W, to dwell in), which denoted the visible forms whereby Jehovah sometimes manifested His presence in the finite world. The idea which must in· this case be attached to u1''1}vavv would be the following, according to M. Reuss : " The terrestrial life of the Word was an unceasing revelation of the Deity." This idea is beautiful and rich. But does not the term U1''1JVOVV, to live in a tent, especiaJly with 364 PROLOGUE. [SEC. Ill the adjunct Iv 71µ,Zv, among us, rather contain an allusion to the tabernacle in the desert, which was, so to speak, J ehovah's tent, Himself a pilgrim among His pilgrim people ? To this conformity between the sort of habitation adopted by Jehovah and that of His people in the desert, there corresponds the entire community of nature and of mode of being between the incarnate Word and men, His brethren. That flesh in which He lived was the tent, like to ours, in which He camped with us. The word

Truth is the reality of things adequately set in the light. And as the essence of things is the moral idea which presides over the existence of each of them, truth is the holy and good thought of God completely unveiled : it is God revealed. In virtue of this attribute, the Word thus became again the light of men (vv. 4, 5). By these two essential attributes of the character of Jesus, the witnesses of His life recognised Him as the only Son coming from the presence of the Father. Their thought was : this Being was God given, God revealed in a perfectly human existence . .As a man, after having made an important discovery, re­ calls with satisfaction the suggestions which first awaked his thought and put his understanding on the way, so the apostle transports himself from the time of full enjoyment to the decisive moment when he heard the first revelation, the fact of the incarnation,-a revelation not understood at first, but made clear afterwards. Ver. 15. "John bears witness of Him, and cried, saying,1 This was He of whom I spake,2 He that cometh after me is ore/erred (Fr. preceded me) before me ; for He was before me." The present " bears witness" implies that the fact described in ver. 14 remains for ever established by this testimony. The verb ,ce,cparye, has cried, is added to show the fact that the testimony was rendered in express and striking terms ; the use of the perf. implies that, though the herald has gone, the proclamation remains. The saying of John is quoted here solely because of its matter. At ver. 3 0 it will be replaced in its historical setting. It was uttered by John in the circle of his disciples the first time he saw Jesus again after having baptized Him. But the evangelist indicates that the fore­ runner even on that early occasion was only quoting himself: 'This is He of whom I said." Indeed, when speaking as he did (ver. 30), he repeated the solemn declaration which he had made the day before in presence of a whole deputation of the Sanhedrim; comp. vv. 26 and 27. The declaration made on the first day contained, of course, only the words in the middle of our verse : "He that cometh after me pnceded me." Ver. 15

1 ~ D b omit ;.,,-.,,, • ~a B C Or. ( once) read • .,,...,, instead of o, .,,...,, ~ omits these words, and adds ., after •px•f'"••• GODET. 2A JOHN. 3'70 I'ROLOGUE. of the prologue reproduces this declaration, not in the briefer form in which it was uttered the first day (ver. 26), but in the developed form in which John repeated and applied it to Jesus on the following day (ver. 3 0); this is proved by the two propositions which begin and close identically in vv. 15 and 30. By this introduction and conclusion John first applied to Jesus personally before his disciples the testimony which he had uttered in public the day before: "This is He of whom I spake ; " then he gave a very brief solution of the sort of enigma contained in this paradoxical declaration, by adding the last words: "for He was before me." The only difference is, that in ver. 15 the apostle substitutes was for the is of ver. 30. The reason for this slight change is simple: the present is was suggested to the forerunner by the presence of Jesus, the situation of ver. 3 0 ; while in ver. 15 the imper­ fect was expresses a logical relation : " When I so spake, it was He whom I had in view." The testimony which the ~postle here reproduces contains a play of words in keeping with the character of John the Baptist and the original sty le of all his discourses : " He who follows me preceded me." Here there is an apparent contradiction, intended to excite ?lttention and stimulate the mental activity of those to whom the saying was addressed. The enigmatical form must also have contributed to impress this important declaration on the memory of the hearers. Many commentators have understood the words : preceded me (in the sense of surpassed me), as referring to the superior dignity and excellence of Jesus as compared with John (Chrysostom, Tholuck, Olshausen, de Wette, Liicke, Luthardt). But, 1. While taking away from the saying of John even the appearance of that contradiction which it should have, the ~xplanation robs it of all its piquancy. 2. The evident correspondence between the prepositions lnrla-@, after, and eµ,1rpoa-0Ev, in front of, before, does not allow us to refer the one to time, the other to dignity. Hofmann alone, we believe, has attempted to take them both in the sense of dignity, and he has also failed. The evangelist intending to prove by the testimony of the forerunner the pre-existence of Christ as the Logos, the temporal sense is the only one which is appropriate. 3. As Meyer observes, the saying Qf John thus understood SEC. III.] OllAP. I. 15. 371

would not have even a logical sense ; for nothing in general ,demands that he who goes before the other should be his superior in dignity. Rather it is the contrary which happens; the herald precedes the sovereign, The two prepositions therefore relate to time, and John means that the Christ who appears after him nevertheless existed befare him. This is the sense adopted by Luther, Meyer, Baumlein. The perfect ryEryovw simply signifies: was then (de facto); comp. vi. 25. --mo7E &Joe ryi.ryovac;, " When camest Thou hither? '' This verb denotes not the eternal essence of the Logos, but the simple fact of His existence anterior to the appearance of the fore­ runner. Did not the Christ, by His presence and activity throughout all the Old Testament time, precede Hisjoreriinner? Domp. xii. 41, 1 0or. x. 4, and the passage of Malachi iii. L from which John the Baptist must himself have derived the notion, as we shall see. When repeating this word on the day following,· J ohu added, in explanation of the enigma, the words : " For He was before 1ne;" literally: "He was my first." Some (0hrysostom, Beza, Calvin, Hofmann, Luthardt) refer this term to superiority of rank; but in this case John must have said is, and not was. Objection is taken to the tautology between this proposition .and the foregoing one, if they are both taken as referring to time. This would be, it is said, to explain the same by the sa,me. It is forgotten that there is a difference between the ,YE"/ove, was there, which belongs to history, and the '9V, was, which, as in the two first verses of the prologue, relates to -essence: "If He preceded me on the stage of history, it is because He was in reality of a superior order to mine (as -eternity is superior to time)." The~" shows, like that ofver. 1, that this being did not pass from nothingness to existence. The commentators who apply the word first, as we do, to time (Meyer, Baumlein), say that the superlative wpwTo~, first, is here put for the comparative wp,frepo<;, anterior, and quote in favour of this meaning xv. 18. But there is more in the word first than a simple comparison between two individuals placed in the same rank, of whom the one is merely anterior to the other. The expression 7TpwTo<; µov, my first, comnines .~wo ideas: the first (absolutely speaking), and first in relation fo me. And the same is the case also xv. 18; for Jesus is 372 PROLOGUE. [SEC. JlL not me\.·ely persecuted before His disciples, as one of them, thejr equal, but as their chief, the real object of that hatred which assails them along with Him. This explanatory proposition therefore contains what it required to embrace the solution of the contradiction presented by the preceding affirmation : Jesus can really have preceded John, because He belongs to the superior order on which every being depends that has appeared in time. It is alleged that John the Baptist cannot have uttered a saying implying the pre-existence of the Messiah, and that it is the evangelist who puts it into his mouth (Strauss, Weisse, de Wette), or who modifies some declaration of the forerunner, so as to give it a meaning which it had not. We answer, first, that the enigmatical and paradoxical turn of this saying is not favourable to such a suspicion. In its very originality it bears the mark of its authenticity. Then, the evangelist, quoting it twice in the following narrative, indicating at tht" same time the place and time when it was uttered, we must. impute to him a rare degree of effrontery if we suppose that. he invented it himself. But, it is asked, could the forerunner have risen to a conception of the person· of Christ which the church reached only much later ? However little John had seriously meditated on the oracle which contained the pro­ gramme of his own ministry, Mal. iii. 1, he must have found in it the contents of the saying quoted by the evangelist. Jehovah, identifying Himself with the Messiah, said: "Behold, I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me, the Messiah." Now, when the sending of the sent one includes his birth, as in this case, it is manifest that he who sends must pre-exist the sent. John the Baptist, then, did nothing more than render in his own piquant and playful style the contents of that oracle which must have been so familiar to him. As to the words of the forerunner : " He who cometh ajtei· me," are they not in reality the reproduction of the prophet's: "He shall prepare the way before me" 'f The forerunner, besides, had received his own revelations, the command, for example, to join with his preaching the extra­ ordinary ceremony of baptism ; it seems that there had been R. sort of theophany: "He that sent me to baptize with water, the same said umo me," i 33. And if we allow some reality .SEC. UL] CHAP. L 16. 373 to the baptism scene, must not the saying of the Father: ~, This is my beloved Son," have gone to open the eyes of .John conclusively to the divine character of Him whom he preceded 1 Moreover, Isaiah had already called the Messiah " Mighty God, Everlasting Father," ix. 6 ; 1 and Daniel had -described Him as " coming with the clouds of heaven," vii. 13. The Rabbis themselves had not been without an under­ standing of what such sayings contained in regard to the person of the Messiah (comp. Meyer). "The Greek seeks wisdom," says St. Paul. The Jew does not reach the understanding of divine things by the way of investigation ; he receives testimony: for he lives in a sphere of revelation. Nothing therefore more natural than the -quotation of the forerunner's testimony, the official witness -of the Messiah, in the prologue. But what completely ex- plains the quotation is, the part which the forerunner's ,declaration seems to have played in the life of the author himself. He had just been relating his own experience, v. 14; and if it be true-as it must be if the author is the Apostle John-that he personally heard this testimony from the mouth of the Baptist, and that this saying formed the starting-point of his faith, and of that of the church in general, how could he avoid encasing it, like an incompar­ able jewel, in this solemn preface? We do not take into account here the absurd readings of the principal Alexan­ -drine MSS. ( N B C). To the testimony of the apostles, and to that of John the Baptist, there is joined, :finally, that of the whole church. Ver. 16. "And 2 of His fulness have all we received, and _grace fm· grace." The word fulness connects this verse with the epithet 7r)v17prr;;, full, at the end of ver. 14. The fact being, that the testimony of the church is in a still more direct relation to that of the apostles than to that of the fore­ runner. A numerous group of authorities, mostly Byzantine, read ,ea{, and, at the beginning of the verse ; while the

1 We know not how many different senses have been sought for these ex• ()ressions. What would be said if orthodox writers indulged in like violence? 2 Instead of '""'• which is given by T. R., with A E F G H r a A rr Syr''"', -Syr"'h, SyrP. ItaJiq, and the most of the }.Inn., there is read .,,, in N BCD L X, fta!i,. Cop. some Mnn. and several Fathers, in particular Or. (thrice\. 374 PROLOGUE. [S"ZC. HL

Alexandrines read l>-rt_. becaiise. The Greco-Latin authoritiel¼ are divided. Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Meyer, and' modem critics in general, prejudiced as they are in favour of thb Ah:xandrine text, uphold thEi second reading. Meyer gives a stmnge proot in its support. The reading and pro­ ceeded, acc0rding to him, from the erroneous idea that ver. 16 is a continuation of the Baptist's discourse. But it is precisely to thb ieading because that the suspicion of this unfortunate origin applies. For the logical particle beca'ttse, much morci­ than the simple and of ver. 16, forms the continuation of ver. 15. The connection by "a{, and, being much looser, easily admits of our detaching this verse from ver. 15, and connect­ ing it, as is evidently the author's intention (comp. the word /illness with the word full), with ver. 14. It certainly does­ not follow from this that ver. 15 is only a parenthesis. The three testimonies are simply placed in juxtaposition, and this is the force of the particle ,ea{, and, and Jiirther. The origin of the Alexandrine reading because is easily explained. We know that the Gnostic Heracleon had regarded vv. 16 and 1 7 as still belonging to the Baptist's discourse. Origen, far from contesting this explanation, extends it even to ver. 18. Other Greek Fathers shared this view, at least in regard to ver. 16. Is it not clear that it was under the influence of this opinion that the and was transformed into because, perhaps with the help of the on, because, which begins the following verse? As to this opinion in itself, it is untenable, for the­ words, all we, ver. 16, imply the existence of the church, and because the past tenses eryevero, came, and E/;1J"f~UaTo, declared, vv. 1 7 and 18, suppose the ministry of Jesus to be closed. The Julness of which John speaks is the inexhaustible riches of gmce and truth (ver. 14) which flowed from the Word made flesh. The following sayings develope those two ideas : ver. 16, that of grace; ver. 18, that of truth; they are both unite1i in the transition saying, ver. 17. The term Julness, w'Jl.~pwµa, denotes that with which an empty space is filled. The force of this word in our context is so simple, so evidently determined by its connection with ver. 14, and the choice ot the word is so naturally accounted for by the epithet 7rr.,0p11i. at the end ot that verse, that it is difticuit to understand how SF.C. III.] CHAP. I. 16. 375 several modern critics (Schwegler, Hilgenfeld) have been able to turn it into a weapon against the authenticity of our Gospel, by deriving it from the Gnostic doctrine of the Valentinian pleroma. It was this sect, on the contrary, which drew its nomendature from the prologue of John, and substituted a mythological sense for the simple meaning belonging to aU the terms: grace, truth, fulness, in our passage (see Introd. p 218 et seq.). Comp. besides, Rom. xv. 29, where Paul uses th6 expression: '1T'A~proµa EVAfY'/[a,;;, fulness of blessing, exactly in the same sense as John in our passage. In the word all we, are embraced all the individual believers mentioned in ver. 12,-that is, the whole church. It is remarkable that the verb, we have received, has no regimen ; arising from the fact that the matter in question was not such or such a blessing received, but above all, the act of receiving itself: "We have all had the privilege of drawing from that inexhaustible source." By the subsequent appendix, and grace for grace, the apostle characterizes less the object than the mode of rece1vmg. The «:at, and, signifies, "And that in the way which I am going to describe." The terms, grace for grace, which are often translated: grace upon grace, contain a sort of play on words. In reality, the preposition lwTt, for, in exchange for, strictly characterizes the legal system. Under the law, a grace is received in exchange for some desert. But in the new order of things, it is a grace received which becomes our title to receive a new gmce. In no other way could the method of complete gratuitousness be better expressed. It was therefore of set purpose that John wrote this livT[, in exchange fm·, instead of hrl, upon, which would simply have designated one grace added to another, as in Phil. ii. 27, and ordinarily. There is a boldness in this application of the very formula of the opposite dispensation to the economy of grace, which betrays the paroxysm of exultation. He thereby invites his readers to make every grace received a motive to be urged before the Lord for obtaining a gTeater favour; and that without ever fearing to exhaust the fulness placed within our reach in the Word made flesh. Chrysostom and Beza understand by the grace granted in exchange for preceding grace, the· New Testament substituted for the Old; but how could the latter be here called grace, when in the verse follow- 376 PROLOGUE. [SEO. Ill ing it bears the name of law, in opposition to grace itself? In the following verse, the experience thus described, ver. 16, is explained by the very essence of the new order of things which has appeared in Christ. Ver. 17. "For the law was given by Moses: grace and truth came by Jesits Ghrist." Here we again meet with the paratactic form characteristic of the Hebrew; a writer of Greek origin would certainly have indicated the contrast between the two propositions of this verse by the particles µiv and Se. The gospel dispensation is opposed to the law as grace and as truth. The gospel, so far as it is grace, offers and gives ; the law commands and demands. Now, as the real essence of God cannot consist in demanding, it follows that the law can only be a transitory, pedagogical phase of the revelation of God, and that the new order of things, that of grace, can alone be that of the full revelation of God, of truth. The subtle explanation of Bengel, Le:.v iram parans (in opposition to grace) et umbram habens (in opposition to truth), would lie more in keeping with the context of Col. ii. 16, 17, than with that of John's prologue. The word e8o011, was given, implies the external and positive institution of the law ; the word came denotes grace and truth appearing historically in the very person of Him who is the essential source of those blessings (ver. 4), and then becoming realized in His life and communicated through Him. Moses may disappear, the law remains nevertheless; it is only given by him. But take away Jesus Christ, and grace and truth disappear; for these gifts have come by Him, they are closely united to His person. " John," says Bengel, "chooses his expressions with the rigour of a philosopher." Let us rather say, with that energetic pre­ cision which is the constant characteristic of the inspired style. It is at this point of the prologue that the apostle for the first time pronounces the great name so long expected, Jesus Ghrist. In proportion as the history of the mercies of the Word toward humanity unfolds before his view, the spectacle inspires him with terms ever more concrete and more human. The Logos of ver. 1 appeared as light, ver. 5; as Son, ver. 14; in ver. 1 7, He is at length called Jesu,s Ghrist,-in the same way as the God of ver. 1 receives the name of Father, in re­ lation to the only-begotten Son, ver. 14, and becomes the :SEC. IIL] CHAP, I. 18 877

Father absolutely, that is, the Son's Father and ours, in ver. 18. Through the incarnation and human life of Jesus, this whole celestial world draws near to us, and takes for us life and 1£Cality. Ver. t 8. "As to God, no man hath seen Him at any time ; the only-begotten Son,1 which is2 in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him." After having developed the first of the two features which constitute the divine character of the glory of Christ, ver. 16, and having conjoined them to ver. 1 7, to contrast them with the law, the apostle now developes the second: truth, and thus finishes the description of the '71"A~­ .pwµ,a, the fulness, ver. 16a. Truth, in the eyes of John, as we have seen, is God perfectly revealed and known. The absence of any connecting particle between vv. 17 and 18 supposes a very intimate logical relation between the verses . this relation consists precisely in the identity of truth and the knowledge of God. In Jesus came truth, because He _possesses and brings the adequate revelation of the Divine Being. The knowledge of God cannot be the result of a philosophical investigation. Our understanding seizes only -certain isolated rays of the revelation of God, dispersed in nature and conscience ; it does not succeed in uniting them into one whole, still less in ascending to the living focus ·from which they emanate. The natural or theocratic revela­ tions, the visions even granted to the saints of the Old Testa­ ment, contained only an approximate manifestation·· of the divine being, as is admirably expressed by the word of the Lord to Moses, at the time when He promises to show him His glory: "Thou shalt see my back parts; bnt my face shall not be seen" (Ex. xxxiii. 23). For "there shall no man, in 11is state of pollution, see God and live" (xxxiii. 20). No -one, therefore, either within or without the theocracy, obtained the privilege of acquiring that complete and living knowledge -of God, of which sight is the emblem. The word God, though the object of the verb, stands at the head of the sentence. It

1 ·while T. R. reads, F<•••Y""' ""'• with 13 Mjj. Syr""', Itpleriq••, Or. (once) a11d -almost all the }fun., we find the reading • 1-'-"'1'""' dso; in ~BC L, Syr"h, Cop. •Clem. Or. (twice), and other Fathers. Elsewhere, Or. reads ,,,,, ,.,,,, ,,,., .,.., ,,,,., readings which are not found in any document. 2 :it omits • ,.,,. 378 PIWLOGU"l tsEc. m .. is the principal idea.-The perf. Jwpa,ce, hath seen, rather denotes the result than the act of vision : "There is no one here below who can speak of God as having seen Him de visii." The full truth, therefore, does not exist on the earth outside of Jesus Christ. It really came with Him, as has been said, ver. 1 7. The second part of ver. 18 states the reason of it_ The reading o µovo,yeviJ<; vlor;;, the only-begotten Son, is cer - ta.inly the true one ; that of the Alexandrines, God the only­ lwgotten Son, despite the authority of the Vatie., has not been, admitted by almost any modern editor, and the support of the. Sincli't. will not procure it for the future any better welcome_ It savours too much of later dogmatics. The fact that it. is found in Clement of Alexandria and in Origen (twice) indicates its origin. The quality attributed to Jesus, of being the perfect revealer of the Divine Being, is founded on His intimate and perfect relation to God Himself: " Who is in the bosom of the Father." Such is virtually the relation between the partic. o wv, who is, and the verb e~,y~uaTo, hath declared. Baumlein rightly says: "That who is proves that Jesus can really reveal God. It is equivalent to an inasmuch as He it (cI.T€ wv)." We can explain in two ways the image used here by John. Either it is borrowed from the position of two neighbour guests at a feast (xiii. 2 3) ; or, what appears more suitable to the context, it is derived from the attitude of a son seated on his father's knees and leaning on his bosom. In any case, it expresses complete openness. He who occupies this unique place understands the Father's most secret thoughts. We can see from the term KO}v1ror;;, bosorn, that the mystery of the Son is a matter, not of metaphysics, but of love. The omission of o wv in the SinaU. is condemned unanimously by the other documents. Hofmann, Meyer, Luthardt (2d ed.), refer this present participle to the state ol Jesus Christ now since His ascension ; and the prep. elr;; is explained, according to Meyer, by the idea of His ?'eturn to. this state. But it is obvious that in this sense this partic. •;;;hich is, could not justify the: "He hath declared," which refers to the terrestrial life of Jesus. Meyer answers, that His elevation confirms the truth of His teaching. This is a.. mere evasion; there is no natural connection between Christ's present state of glory and His ministry of teaching while He- SEC. III.J CHAP. L 18. 379- was here below. This present partic. can therefore only refer l:-0 a state which preceded or accompanied the earthly ministry of Jesus. It may be applied (like the analogous expression of ver. 1 : ,1,-v wpo,;;) to the divine state of the Logos before the incarnation. A man who does not rank among commentators -Napoleon-has expressed himself thus: "Christianity says with simplicity, No man hath seen God, except God; that is a. saying of profound meaning." This saying indicates the rela­ tion between our o &Sv, which is, and the verb Jf,rt~a-aTo, hath declared, better than many theologians have been able to grasp it. Yet the eternal relation of the Son to the Father could not directly influence His religious teaching here below ; for He spoke on the earth as a man. If He had spoken of God as God, His language would have been incomprehensible. Then all that the Son has revealed of God on the earth must have passed through His human consciousness. But this human consciousness, especially after the fact of His baptism, was that of the Son; and thereby He possessed, as no other, the necessary organ for knowing God as His Father. Finally, if account is taken of the fact that His earthly teaching was completed by the Holy Ghost whom He sent after His ascension, we recover in this way the truth contained in the explanations of Meyer and Hofmann; and we thus reach the full interpretation, that of Liicke, which applies the pres. partic. o wv, which is, to the permanent and indestructible relation between the Son and the Father. This relation may have passed through very different phases ; but it has never been completely interrupted for a moment (iii. 13). The use of the preposition of motion, el<;, towards, with the verb of rest, &Sv, which is, arises from the fact that the regimen, "the bosom of the Father," denotes in reality, not a place, but a life. The Son is there only because He plunges into it by His un­ ceasing action; it is so with every state which consists in a moral relation. It was the meaning of the phrase already referred to, ~v wpo,;; (ver. 1 ). The substitution of el,;; for ,rpo,;;, in our verse, arises from the difference between a strictly local regimen (,co)\.wo,;;) and a personal regimen (0eo,;;). The pron. E!Ce'ivor; is here, as usually in John, exclusive, "He. and He alone." To explain the use of the word lg,qrye'i.cr0a£, it doe~ not seem to us natural, whatever Meyer may say, to ha"i: 380 PROLOGUE. [SEC. III.

recourse to the technical application of the word among tht: Greeks, who used it to denote the explanation of divine things by the eg7J"/7JTat, the men officially charged with this function. The simplicity of John's style excludes this association, which is not necessary to explain the expression. The understood object of l~7~uarn, katk declared, is undoubtedly the first word of the verse, 0f6v, God, the influence of which makes itself felt to the end. But John did not express it with the view of calling attention, as at ver. 16, to the verbal notion rather than to the object of the action: "He, even He hath declai·ed ! truly declared!" His teaching about God alone deserves the name of interpretation. Meyer prefers to supply as the object: the contents of what He has seen in God. We see from the word '1t'aTp6,, of the Father, that the truth brought into the world by the Son does not consist of a collection of new metaphysical ideas about God, but rather of the revelation of His Father-character. To make this revelation, it was sufficient for Jesus to reveal Himself a5 the Son ; for to prove Himself Son, is to teach the world what it never would have suspected: that God is essentially .a Father. And if He is Father in His inmost essence, and in virtue of an eternal relation, how could His relations to His creatures fail to have also a paternal character 1 Such is the new explanation which the Son has given of the Divine Being, and which He alone as the Son could give. It is the initiation of the earth into the deepest secret of heaven : Goo is from all eternity Fatker,-that is to say, love. Outside of this divine interpretation contained in the life and sayings of Jesus, every idea which man forms of God is imperfect or imaginary, an idea, and, up to a certain point, an -idol, accord­ ing to John's own expression (1 John v. 21). All, therefore, that man would have found on the pathway of obedience in communion with the Logos his Creator, he recovers by the way of faith in the person of Jesus Christ. The word diffused life : Jesus brings it to us again in the form of grace. From life there sprang up light : Jesus gives it back to us under the name of truth. God-given, God­ manifested : such are the blessings which prove the real presence in Jesus Christ of the Divine Logos revealed in the fhst verses of the prologue. The church. bv receiving from THE PLAN OF THE PROLOGUE. 381 Him those incomparable gifts, can herself attest as well as those first witnesses the identity of the Person of the Logos with that of Jesus Christ, and, joining her testimony to the choir of the' apostles and to that of the prophets, the one represented by the evangelist, the other by the forerunner (vv. 14, 15), can bear witness, on the foundation of a living experience, to the fact, without which both life and light for man disappear : the incarnation of the word, the umon con­ summated in Christ between God and man.

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ON THE PROLOGUE.

L THE PLAN OF THE PROLOGUE.

Three thoughts appear to us to sum up this so remarkable piece, and to mark its progress : the Logos, the Logos mis­ iinderstood, the Logos recognised and received; in other words, the Logos (vv. 1-4), unbelief (vv. 5-11), and faith (vv. 12-18). Between the first and second part ver. 5 forms the transition, as between the second and third vv. 12 and 13. The relation between the last and the first is indicated externally by the similarity of the expressions in vv. 18 and 1 ; it may be formulated thus: He whom the church knows and possesses as her Redeemer, is no other than the eternal Logos, the life and light-giving principle of the universe, the creator of all things. By faith in this Incarnate Word the church is restored to her normal relation, to this principle of life for the universe and of light for man. This plan seems to us preferable to that which Luthardt maintains in his second edition : three parts or cycles, each containing, although from a somewhat different point of view, a summary of the whole Gospel history: vv. 1-5, 6-13, 14-18. There is something on the face of it improbable in this thrice repeated summary of one and the same history. Besides, Luthardt is obliged himself to acknowledge that in the first cycle faith is not a subject in question,-whicb 382 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. is, however, one of the essential factors of the Gospel history, -and that, in the third, unbelief is as little a subject in question, though one of the most decisive elements of this history. Finally, is it not contrary to all exegetical pro­ bability to give to the 0€, but, of ver. 12, the only adversative particle of the prologue, an altogether secondary sense, instead of regarding it as indicating the great contrast between unbelief and faith ?-and then to draw the line of demar­ cation between the second and third part at ver. 14, which runs so strictly between vv. 12 and 13 ? Very far, then, from admitting three cycles, each presenting the whole of the history, we hold to three cycles, each pre­ senting one of the three factors of the history. The entire narrative will rest precisely on the relation of those three factors, and the prologue thus appears introducing, as it were, on the scene the personages of the drama which is to follow, presented in their highest signification.

II. INTENTION OF THE PROLOGUE. What is the object of this introduction? Has it regard to speculation or faith ? "\Ve here meet with three opinions : the first ascribes to the author a purely speculative aim ; the second supports a strictly practical intention, but one complicated with meta­ physical prepossessions ; finally, according to the third, the author, while ascending to the highest principles of Christian knowledge, proposes no other aim than that which he himself professes (xx. 31): "That ye might believe," and which de­ manded, above all, that the object of faith should be revealed in all its grandeur. 1. The Tiibingen School is the most thoroughgoing expo­ nent of the first view. .According to it, the author unfolds in the prologue the idea which is the metaphysical basis of the following narrative, or rather, which is its real source. The speculative idea of a mediator between the infinite God and the finite world was found by the author in the sphere in which he lived, expounded in the prologue, and illustrated by means of the almost wholly fictitious narrative which follows. 1

1 Comp. pp. 96, 97 ; 98, 99 ; 106 et seq.; 173-180 ; 261, 262. INTENTION OF THE PROLOGUE. 383

lf the results to which exegesis has brought us are well •founded, this mode of regarding the prologue is untenable. 1.V e have seen in reality that the notion of the Logos does not prepossess the author for itself, but solely in relation to the historical appearing of Jesus. The thesis," The Word was made flesh," is not set down for the sake of this one, "In the beginning was the Word;" it is this, on the contrary, which is subservient to the former. John does not come to invite his readers to a metaphysical walk amid the depths of the divine .essence, in order to discover a being called the Logos ; he simply wishes to lead them to put such confidence in the historical Christ, that they may through Him have access to the riches of God Himself. It is not the person of Jesus which is at the service of the thesis of the Logos; if Jesus receives this title, it is that men may attach themselves to Him as the perfect Mediator. Nothing is more fitted to indicate the opposition between the speculative intention ascribed to the prologue by Baur and the real aim of this whole passage, than the explanation which this critic gives ofver. 14. The proposition," The Word was rnade flesh," in which we have found the central word of the prologue, holds, according to Baur, a wholly subordinate place ; it expresses merely the historically insignificant phenomenon of the visibility of the Word ; salvation is not attached to this fact ; the latter only serves to make its sweetness a little more felt. This explanation demonstrates, better than all proofs, the contradiction which exists between the idealism of the Tiibingen theologian and the serious realism of the evangelist. 2. M. Reuss has avoided such an exaggeration. He acknowledges that the essential tendency of the prologue is pre-eminently practical ; that John wishes to guide his readers to faith. But while unfolding with this intention the object of faith, he adds thereto a speculative thesis. "It was not his concern at all to make one metaphysical theory prevail over .another ; speculation with the apostle was not an end, but a means." He only sought to explain to himself philosophically .the contents of his faith, and the notion of the Logos was only the means with which contemporaneous philosophy ·furnished him for gaining his end. The invitation to faith 384 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. became thereby transformed under his pen into an initiation, o:i:' his readers into Christian Gnosis. This is also the result. re ched by Liicke's study. This view, while saving, on the one hand, the practical and apostolical character of the prologue, accounts, on the other, for the use of the term Logos, which seems to belong to the· language of philosophy. It would follow from this view that John blended in one unique whole the elements drawn from the teaching of Jesus and those which he borrowed from the metaphysics of Philo. But we must then reject the authenticity of the Gospel, which M. Reuss does not do. Is it conceivable that an apostle could have offered to the faith of the church a Christ resulting from such an amalgam ? If John proposed to fix i.n writing the theory of the Logos which had rendered to him personally the high service of interpreting his faith to him, could he not at least content himself with doing so in the epistolary form which he knew and used ? Was it allowable for him to work out with this view the composition of a, gospel? M. Reuss seems to regard this procedure as unconscious­ and innocent. Unconscious ? But it has long been mattel of remark that John avoids putting the term Logos in the mouth of Jesus. He was therefore conscious of the difference between what he held from His teaching and what proceeded from another source. Innocent ? On this point history has pronounced, and its sentence is severe. History says in substance, that of all the writings of the New Testament, the­ Gospel of John above all, and of all the parts of this Gospel,. the prologue above all, have paved the way for Jesuolatry, and thereby for eighteen centuries kept Christianity in the condition of a mitigated paganism. Julian the apostate knew this when he said, "It was John who declared that the V{ ord was made flesh, . . . and he ought to be regarded as the source of all the mischief." 1 Such is the result of those innocent speculative vagaries of John l He is the apostle who with his own hand threw into the dough of the Gospel the leaven of idolatry, and this leaven immediately raised the dough, 1 Cyril, Cont. Julian., quoted from .A. Nicolas, Etud~ philos. sur le christian• ism.e, t iv l'· 117. INTENTION OF THE PROLOGUE. 385 falsified the doctrine, vitiated the worship in spirit and in truth, and changed the Christian life at its springs. Not till the present day has the world begun to awake from this infatuation, and to recognise the true culprit pointed out by Julian! Thus it is that the promise of the Master has been verified, " He that heareth you heareth me ! " In short, the explanation of M. Reuss severs the theory of the Logos, as an accidental excrescence, from John's religious faith. But it is easy, on the contrary, to assure ourselves that this alleged speculation forms the basis of the apostle's faith in its most essential and vital elements. FoR JOHN, JESUS IS THE LOGOS, OR HE IS NOTHING. If the unbelief of the Jews is in his eyes a thing so monstrous, it is because in rejecting Jesus they have rejected the Logos. If faith saves and regenerates us, it is because it puts us in communion through Jesus with the Logos made flesh. Now, how could the metapnysical formula have so swallowed up in the heart of John the living object of his faith, Jesus personally known and loved, that the latter was nothing in his eyes without the former ! He, the witness of that Life, the table companion, the intimate of that Master, he could have gone so far in his speculative mania as to place the vivifying force of the Gospel no more in that person Himself, but in the philosophical conception which he had formed of Hirn! This supposition is a moral impossibility. The prologue, therefore, rightly understood, does not in the least justify such a view: it is a preface intended to initiate the reader in the true essence of the fact which is about to be related; it reveals its august character, solitary grandeur, and vital importance. The prologue is like that technical term which the composer places at the head of a musical piece, to indicate to the performer the accent and time which it requires. To raise the mind of the reader to the height of the drama which is about to unfold before his view; to make him feel that here is not a history which he may con­ found with others, and set aside, after having read it, to pass to another; that it contains the secret of the life of humanity, and so of his own ; that the doctrines are nothing less than rays from the absolute Word; that, accepted, they will become his salvation; rejected, his death; that unbelief in regard to GODET. 2 R JOHN. 386 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.

Jesus is God cast off; faith, God received and possessed ;· such is the real intention of the prologue. This piece is the commentary on the name Gospel; it proclaims the highest message of God to earth. It transports the reader at the first line into the divine sphere to which this history belongs. Thus John, in writing this introduction, has not gone beyond his part as an apostle, and his book is really from the first word to the last an appeal to faith, nothing more and nothing less. Our conviction.of this truth will be thoroughly established as we account for the origin of the notion and the term Logos, and as we prove that the borrowings from con­ temporaneous metaphysics, which are ascribed to the apostle, are in reality only loans which are made to him.

III. THE IDEA AND TERM LOGOS. The three questions which we have to resolve are these: Whence did the evangelist derive the notion of the Logos? What is the origin of this extraordinary term ? What is the reason of its use ? First of all we establish a fact, viz. that the prologue does not contain a thought which goes beyond Christ's own testimony in the fourth Gospel, and the teachings of the Old Testament explained by this light. B. Weiss 1 mentions two principal points in which the prologue seems to him to go beyond the testimony of Christ: 1. The notion of the Word, by which John expresses the pre-historic existence of Christ ; 2. The creating function which is attributed to that Being. But do not the entire contents of the first propositions of the prologue flow from the following sayings put by John into the mouth of Jesus : " What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where He was before ? " vi. 6 2 ; " Verily, verily, I say unto yoii, Befoi·e Abraham was, I am," viii. 58; "And now, 0 Fatl~er, glorify Thou me with Thine own self, with the glory which I had with Thee bef01·e the creation of the world," xvii. 5 ; " For Thou lovedst 1ne bejore the creation of the world," xvii. 2 4. 1Ieantime let us leave aside the term Logos, to which we shall return. If Christ existed personally before the creation, as He affirms in those sayings, could He exist otherwise than 1 Johanneische1· LeM·begriff, 1862. THE IDEA AND TERM LOGOS. 387 with God and in God, as the prologue says ? And as to His creating function, was it not enough to connect the thought of the eternal existence of the Logos in God with the saying, " Thou lovedst me before the creation of the world," to be aware that He who speaks thus cannot have remained a stranger to the work which brought the world out of nothing. This is the necessary inference from v. 17, ".As the Father w01·keth hitherto, I work also," comp. v. 19 and 26. The other assertions of the prologue are deduced with the same ease from the discourses and acts of Jesus in the Gospel : ver. 4 (" In Hi1n was life" ...) from v. 26: ".As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself;" ver. 9 (" That was the true light") from viii. 12 and ix. 5 : " I am the light of the world . . . He that followeth me shall have the light of life ; " ver. 7 (" John came for a witness") from i. 34 : ".And I saw, and bare rec01·d, that this is the Son -0f God," and from v. 3 3 : " Ye sent unto John, and he bare witness unto the truth." The prologue expresses the idea of the presence and activity of the Logos in the world generally, and in the theocracy in particular (His house, and His own), previously to His incarnation, vv. 10 and 11. This idea flows directly from what Jesus teaches in chap. x. as to how the voice ,of the Shepherd is recognised by His sheep ; and that not only by those who are already in the Old Testament fold ( ver. 3), but also by those who are not of that fold (ver. 16), the children of -Ood scattered throughout the world (xi. 52). The contrast between carnal birth and divine generation, which plays so conspicuous a part in the prologue (ver. 13), is expressly taught by Jesus in the saying (iii. 6): "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." The reality of Christ's humanity, so forcibly asserted in the prologue (ver. 14), is one of the fundamental ideas of the entire narrative. In no Gospel, perhaps, so much as the fourth, does the purely human side of our Saviour's person and affections come into view. He is worn out with fatigun (iv. 6) ; He thirsts (iv. 7); He weeps over His friend (xi. 35); He is moved and even agitated (xi. 33, xii. 27). At the sam.e time, His glory, full of gmce and truth, His Son -character, of which the prologue speaks so admirably (vv. 14-18), appears in the narrative of all the manifestations of 388 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.

Jesus in act and word : in the account of His entire depen­ dence (vi. 38 et seq.), of His absolute docility (v. 30, etc.), of His unlimited intimacy with the Father (v. 20), of the greatness of the works which He receives power to do, as to quicken and judge (v. 21, 22), of His perfect assurance of being heard, whatever He may ask (xi. 41, 42), of the adora­ tion which He accepts (xx. 28), and which He demands even as the equal of the Father (v. 23). The testimony of John the Baptist, qll'Oted at v. 15, is borrowed textually from the following narrative (i. 27, 30). The idea of the gift of the law as a preparation for the Gospel (ver. 17), flows from v. 46, 47. Ver. 18, which closes the prologue, reproduces almost textually the saying, vi. 46 : "Not that any man hath seen the Father, save He which is of the Father, He hath seen the Father." Finally, the terms Son and only-begotten Son are borrowed from vi. 40 : "This is the will of the Father, that every one which seetk the Son," ... from iii. 16 (which John certainly puts into the mouth of Jesus): "God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son," and from iii. 18 : " Because he hatk not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God." The sayings ascribed to Jesus in the course of the narrative thus contain all the ideas expressed in the prologue, or at least their immediate premises. We cannot even except the idea of creation by the Word. There remains only the term Logos, used by John to designate the Son in His pre-existent state. Undoubtedly it is this term, used in the philosophical language of the time, which has led to the author of the prologue being transformed from a disciple of Jesus into a. disciple of Philo. We shall not return upon the subject, which we have already considered in the Introduction (p. 17 4 et seq.), of the relations between the view of John and the system of Philo. We shall confine ourselves to summing up the differences which distinguish and even contrast them. 1. The word ).oryor;, in John, signifies, as in the biblical text, word. In Philo, it signifies, as it does in philosophical language, reason,--a fact which leads us to suspect a certain difference of origin in the use which they make of the same term. THE IDEA AND TERM LOGOS. 389

2. The speculation of the Logos has in Philo a metaphysical bearing. God being conceived as the absolutely indeterminate and impersonal Being, it was impossible to pass from such a Being to the finite and va1·ied world which we behold. Tc. explain this great fact, Philo must therefore have recourse tu an intermediate agent-a second God, the divine reason per­ sonified, the Logos. In John, the notion of the Logos has an -entirely different bearing ; it is not at all necessitated by the nature of God Himself. For him God is a F'ather (i. 18); His essence is love (iii 16). He puts Himself into personal relation with the world ; He loves it ; He determines to save it, and it is He Himself who sends into it the Logos (vi. 32). Nay more, it is He who acts as intermediate agent between the world and the Son who has become man. He draws me11 to Christ; He gives them to Him (vi. 37, 44). He testifies in His favour, even in the world of sense, by miracles (v. 36, 37, xii. 28). What an offence to the thought of the sage of .Alexandria! In a word, the existence and activity of the Logos in John are a matter of love (i 18, xvii 24), not at all a logical necessity. 3. The work of the Logos in Philo is confined to the crea­ tion and preservation of the world ; the thought does not even occur to him of connecting it with the salvation either of Jews or of the world, any more than with the appearing of the Messiah. In John, on the contrary, if mention is made -of the creating Logos, it is only on the occasion and in view -0f the redemption of which this Divine Being is to be the agent; the Messianic idea finds its perfect realization in His appearing. For Philo, as for Plato, the principle of evil i~ matter ; and hence he cannot think of making the Logos appear- on the earth in a bodily form. The idea of the incar­ nation would have filled him with horror. In John, on th•~ -contrary, the grand fact of history is this: "the Logos was made flesh." This central word of the prologue expresses the act to which everything in the past leads on, and from which everything flows in the futu~e. If, therefore, the rational premises are different and opposite in the two authors ; if the very term Logos is used by them in different meanings,-it becomes impossible to regard the one .as the disciple of the other. What remains for us is to seek. 390 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.

by going back beyond both, a common source which shall explain the coincidence of expression in the diversity of views. This source is not hard to find. John and Philo were both Jews. The same Old Testament had therefore regulated their religious education. Now, there were three lines in this Holy Book converging to the notion and the term of whose explana­ tion we are in search : 1. The appearances of the angel of the Lord (Maleach Jehovah), that messenger of God who serves as­ His agent in the world of sense, and who is sometimes dis­ tinguished from Jehovah, and again identical with Him ; comp. e.g. Gen. xvi. 7 with ver. 13 ; then Gen. xxxii. 2 8 wiih Hos. xii. 4, 5. God says of this mysterious being, Ex. xxiii. 21: ".fify name (the knowledge of my inmost essence) is in him." In Mal. iii. 1 it is positively declared that the Messiah shall be no other than this Divine Person, the God adored in the temple of Jerusalem : "Adonaf (the Lord), whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple, even the Angel of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, He shall come." Zech. xii. 10 presents the same view. The Messiah, who is to be pier::-ed by His people, is Jehovah Himself : " They shall look upon me whom they have pierced," says Jehovah. Thus, then, according to the Old Testament, this Divine Person, after having been from the beginning the agent in all the theo­ phanies, is to finish His office as Mediator by Himself filling the function of Messiah. 2. The description of wisdom, Prov. viii.: " The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works even then" (ver. 22). " When He prepared the heavens, I was there" (ver. 2 7). "I was by Him, as an, artificm·; I was daily joyful, rejoicing always before Him ; rejoicing in the habitable part of His em·th ; and my delights. were with the sons of men" (vv. 30 and 31). What charac­ terizes this passage is the participation of Wisdom in the work of creation. This aspect does not come out in the doctrine of the angel of the Lord. On the other hand, the latter is a real personality, while the delineation of Wisdom in Proverbs seems to be only a poetical personification. 3. The active part ascribed to the Word of the Lord. This part begins with creation, and is continued in the prophetical tevelations. Certain passages tend to personify this agent,· It is a physician sent from heaven to heal, Ps. cvii. 2 0 ; a THE IDEA AND TERM LOGOS. 391

divine messenger who traverses the world, Ps. cxl vii. 15 ; the infallible agent of the divine decrees, Isa. Iv. J 1. From the time of the Babylonish captivity, the Jewish doctors associated those three modes of manifestation and action on the part of the Divine Being in the finite world, and united them in one single conception : that of a permanent agent of Jehovah in the sensible world, whom they desig­ nated by the name of Memra (Word) of Jehovah (i-m,• ,., Nir.>•o,1 Introd. I. p. 179); leaving it impossible, I believe, to decide with certainty whether the theology of those Jewish Rabbis established a relation between this Word of the Lord and the person of the Messiah. 2 1 This expression is nsed along with that of Shekinah, in the Targums or Chaldee paraphrases of the Old Testament. The two oldest, those of Onkelos and Jonathan, were generally regarded as dating from the middle of the first century of our era. Recent works seem to bring down the compilation of them to the third or fourth century ; but their compilation only. For a multitude of particulars prove that the materials go back to apostolic times. There are proofs even of the existence of compilations going back to the time of John Hyrcanus. With the Jews all is matter of tradition. The compilation in such a case is only " the consummation of the work of centuries." Comp. Schiirer, Lehrb. d. Neutest. ZeUgesch., pp. 478 and 479. • Perhaps in Palestine there was more disposition to fuse in one the notion of the Word and the Messianic idea than at Alexandria. There is found in the Book of Enoch (belonging to the latter part of the second century B.o.), and in one of its very parts which are almost unanimously recognised as the oldest, a strange passage, which, if the form in which we possess it is the exact reproduction of the original text, would exclude all doubt on this point. The Messiah is there represented (chap. xc. 16-38) as a white bull, which, after receiving the adoration of all the animals of the earth, transforms all those races into white bulls like itself; after which the poet adds : "And the first bull was the Word, and this Word was a powerful itnimal which had large black horns on its head [the emblem of divine omnipotence]." ••. Thus it is that Dillmann, in his classical work on this book, reproduces those last words. Comp. the remarkable essay of M. Wabnitz, Rev. de Theolog. July 1874. The Messianic application of this passage admits of no doubt (see Schurer, Lehrbuch der Neutest. Zeitgesch., p. 568). As to the last words, M. Wabnitz says: "This text contains an enigma for us which will perhaps one day be resolved." We must remember, indeed, that we have the Book of Enoch only in an Ethiopic translation, evidently made from a Greek text, which in tum seems to be the version of a Hebrew or Aramaic original. Nevertheless, it seems to us that there is here a possible indication of the relation established in Palestine from a date B.C., between the Divin~ Being called 1femra or Word and the person of the Messiah. There is no doubt of the Palestinian origin of the Book of Enoch. That of Wisdom, which was zomposed at Alexandria a century before Christ, speaks, indeed, of Wisdom, per­ sonifying it very forcibly. But I cannot discover in it (even in chap. vii.) the notion of a real personality, nor recognise in the deline.ition of the persecuted inst- man in chap. ii. the least allusion to the person of the M"ss:1'.h. 392 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.

The idea of a Divine Being, the organ of J ehovah's works and revelations in the sensible world, mm:it therefore have been more or less familiar both to John and Philo. Such is the datum common to the two authors. 1:t'rom that point their ways diverge and go in opposite directions. John enters the school of Jesus, where the notion of the Word takes for him a historical and perfectly concrete value. He hears Jesus assert, that before Abraham He is; that the Father loved Him before th;;; creation of the v;orld. . . • How could he fail to apply to Him that idea of the Word, which in so many different ways strikes its roots into the soil of the Old Testament 1 The term Logos presents itself quite natur­ ally to his mind to designate this Divine Being who has appeared in Christ,-first, because it is of biblical origin; and then because the Jewish doctors already apply it, as we have just seen, to that superhuman Mediator. How unnecessary it is to explain the use of the term by supposing a connec­ tion on John's part with the Alexandrian speculation, appears from the fact that the same term is used in the same sense in a book-the Apocalypse-which does not in the least bear the stamp of Alexandrine idealism, xix. 13: " And His name is called the Word of God." Philo, instead of proceeding, like John, on the line of the development of normal revelation, is placed at Alexandria under the influence of the Greek philoso­ phers, especially of Platonism and Stoicism, which the Jewish school of that capital strove to amalgamate with Judaism. Those foreign masters teach him to make of the Logos a being of pure reason-the intelligible word, in the divine mind. As he rationalizes the Jewish meaning of the word Logos, he proceeds in the same fashion with the other terms rendered familiar to him by his Jewish education,-those of angel, archangel, high priest, and son. The scriptural reminiscences of the Old Testament throughout serve him only as materials for allegorizing in the service of conceptions which he has borrowed from Greek philosophy. Thus are explained both the resemblances a::id contrasts between the two writers, without the necessity of having recourse to the imitation of either by the other-the same Jewish antecedents, but developed, on the one hand, in the direction of Christian realism ; on the other, in that of the THE IDEA AND TERM LOGOS. 393 mystic rationulism of Alexandria. In the one way the idea -0f the Logos becomes identified with the person of the ,Christ; in the other, every connecting link is broken between this idea and that of the Messiah.1 What, then, did John mean by applying to Jesus the name .of the Word 1 To introduce into the church an Alexandrine speculation 1 He had no such view. He meant to designate the historical person called Jesus Christ as God's absolute revelation to the earth. By using this name, under which the Rabbis collected all the theocratic revelations, he meant to connect them with their living and permanent principle. At the foundation of all words spoken he found the Word whence they proceed, and under this name he proclaimed the great­ ness of his Master. But the use of the name had no doubt a peculiar appro­ priateness in the sphere in which John wrote. If he com­ posed his Gospel in Asia Minor after a somewhat prolonged sojourn in that country (see Introd. I. p. 246 et seq.), he must ,to a certainty have met with this doctrine of the Logos, which was so widely prevalent at Alexandria, and of which we find a trace perhaps in Heh iv. 13, 14. How could it miss pene­ trating, with the term which expressed it, into the countries of which Ephesus was the centre ? The relations between those great centres of culture, Alexandria, Ephesus, Corinth, -etc., were incessant. We have an example in the New Testa­ ment itself, in the person of Apollos (Acts xviii. 24 and 27). :Surrounded by all those Hellenes and Hellenised Jews who speculated on the relations between the finite and the infinite, and strove to fill up the gulf between the two spheres by the speculation of the Logos, John says to them in his pro­ logue : " Come to us ; the church possesses more than the notion of the Logos,-she possesses the Logos Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. From His fulness we have all drawn, even the most ignorant of us. Believe with us, and you shall receive from Him, as we have done, grace for grace." 2

1 Not that Philo i~ an entire stranger to the expectation of the Messiah (see ·the .ilready quoted treatise of M. Wabnitz, second article, October 1874, p. 153 -et seq.). But with him there is no point of contact between the idea of the Logos .and the Messianic person. 11 Comp.tl'il .Neander, Geach. d. Pflanzung d. Ohristl. K •• t. ii. p. 549. 394 G:JJ;NERAL CONSIDERATIONEt

Thus John has contrived to place the healthy and quicken­ ing realism of Christianity in opposition to the hollow idealism. which he found amid his surroundings.

l V. THE TRUTH AND IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION OF THE PERSON OF JESUS EXPRESSED IN THE PROLOGUE.

If the prologue of John does nothing more than sum up, the testimony which Jesus bore to Himself, expressing it in a striking formula calculated to impress it deeply on the consciousness of the church, there can be nothing more erroneous than to contrast it with the teaching of the Synoptics and of St. Paul, and to represent it as the final result of a series of different Christological conceptions raised chronologically the one upon the other. On the contrary, . .John's teaching is the purest and most normal, and at the same time the most rich and elevated expression of the con­ sciousness which Christ had of Himself (see Introd. I. pp. 3-5). Could this consciousness be only the height of self-exalta­ tion, as is assumed in M. Renan's work 1 The explana­ tion is incompatible with the moral character of Jesus. If He indulged in self-exaggeration even to folly, how are we to understand His inward calm, His profound humility, His un­ alterably sound judgment, His profoundly true appreciation of all moral relations, whether between God and man, or between man and man 1 M. Renan's hypothesis is belied by the whole life of Jesus, and by that kingdom of truth and holiness which has gone forth from it over the world of humanity. Or must we call in question the historical accuracy of the, discourses which John has put into the mouth of Jesus t We think we have demonstrated in the Introdnetion (I. p. 134 et seq.) the full confidence which John's narrative deserves in this particular as well as in regard to facts. There remain the objections which may be raised by the matter of John's teaching: l. According to M. Reuss,1 there is a contradiction between the prologue, which teaches the perfect equality of the Father and tha Son (as it is professed by ecclesiastical orthodoxy) .. 1 Hist. de la Tlteol. chret., t. ii. p. 440 et se11. THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS IN THE PROLOGUE. 395 and the numerous sayings of Jesus in the Gospel, whence there arises the idea of the Son's subordination to the Father. The doctrine of equality is thus, according to him, a thesis borrowed from the schools and from Philo ; that of su bordina­ tion is the true thought contained in the testimonies which emanated from the mouth of Christ. The exegesis of the prologue has shown that this contradiction has no existence, inasmuch as subordination is the thought of the preface as much as that of the discourses contained in the Gospel Take for example the expressions: "being with God," ver. 1 ; "only­ begotten Son," ver. 14; "being in the bosom of the Father," ver. 18; these expressions imply subordination as thoroughly as any saying of the Gospel. The mistake of M. Reuss is his confounding the forms of the Nicene Creed with the theology of the prologue. 2. Baur 1 does not believe in the possibility of reconciling the notion of the incarnation with that of the miraculous birth taught in the Synoptics. In the view of the latter, the person who is the subject of the Gospel history does not begin to exist till the birth of Jesus ; from the incarnation point of view, on the contrary, this subject exists previously to His appearance in the flesh, and could not become afterwards any­ thing which He is not already. But if we take in earnest the expression: was made .flesh,-which Baur does not do,­ the alleged contradiction falls of itself. The subject of the Gospel history is not the Logos continuing in His divine state, but a true man ; and the fact of a real birth, miraculous or natural, becomes in such a being not only a possible, but a necessary element. 3. The most serious objection arises from the impossibility of reconciling the pre-existence of Christ with His real humanity. Thus Lticke,2 while fully recognising the danger which lies in rejecting the pre-existence, nevertheless thinks himself obliged to deny the fact, because there would result from it a difference of essence between the Saviour and His brethren, which would not allow us to conceive either His character as Son of man or His redemptive office. This is likewise the view of Weizsacker.3 Undoubtedly the com-

1 Theol. Jahrb. 1844, t. iii. p. 24 et seq. 2 T. i. p. 378. • Jahrb. fur deuf'8che Thwl., vol. vii. 4th part, pp. 639 and. 655-664. 396 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. munion of the Son with the Father is not merely moral ; He does not acquire His dignity of Sonship by His fidelity; it is, on the contrary, presupposed by everything He does and says ; His fidelity maintains, but does not produce, this original relation ; it is the unacquired condition of the consciousness which He has of Himself. But, on the other hand, it must be owned that as to the superior knowledge which Christ possessed, it could not be the continuation of a previous knowledge brought by Hirn from above; otherwise, it would not have that progressive character limited to the task of the moment which we recognise in it, and which stamps it as a truly human knowledge. And as to the moral task of Jesus, it would no longer, on such a condition, have anything human in it ; for where would be the moral struggle in the case of the Son if He still possessed that complete knowledge of the divine plan which He had eternally in the Father's presence 1 After having striven to eliminate from the discourses of Jesm:1 the idea of pre-existence, W eizsacker nevertheless concludes that there are in the fourth Gospel two Christs, placed in juxtaposition-the one truly man, as taught by Jesus Himself and the Synoptics-the other divine and pre-existent, that of John. In attempting to solve this difficulty, we do not con­ ceal from ourselves that we come on the most arduous problem of theology. What we shall seek in the lines which follow is not the reconciliation of Scripture with any orthodoxy what­ ever, but the harmony of Scripture with itself. Does Scripture, while clearly teaching the eternal existence of the Word, teach at the same time the presence of the divine state and attributes in Jesus during the course of His life on earth 1 We have seen that the formula of John i. 14 is incompatible with such an idea. The expression, " The Word was made flesk!' speaks certainly of a divine subject, but as reduced to the str.ce of man, which, as we have seen, does not at all suppose the two states, the divine and human, as co-existing in it. Such a notion is set aside by exegesis as well as by logic. The impoverishment of Christ, of which Pau1 speaks 2 Cor. viii. 9, His voluntary self-abasement, described Phil. ii. 6, 7, equally imply His renunciation of the divine state at the moment when He entered upon human existence. The faets of the gospel history are at one with those apostolic THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS IN THE PROLOGUE. 3 9 7 declarations, as we have shown in the Introduction (I. p. 1 O6 et seq.). Jesus no longer possesses on the earth the attributes which constitute the divine state. Omniscience He has not for He asks questions, and Himself declares His ignorance o~ one point (Mark xiii. 32). He possesses a pre-eminent prophetic vision (John iv. 17, 18), but this vision is not ommscience. No more does He possess omnipotence, for He prays, and is heard ; as to His miracles, it is the Father who works them in His favour (xi. 42, v. 36). He is equally destitute of omnipresence. His love even, perfect as it is, is not divine love. This is immutable. But who will assert that Jesus in His cradle loved as He did at the age of twelve, or at the age of twelve as He did on the cross ? Perfect relatively, at every given moment, His love grew from day to day, both in regard to the intensity of His voluntary self­ sacrifice, and as to the extent of the circle which it embraced. It was thus a truly human love. "The grace which is by one man, Jesus Christ," says St. Paul for this reason (Rom. v. 15). His holiness is also a human holiness, for it is realized every moment only at the cost of struggle, through the re­ nunciation of legitimate enjoyment and victory over the natural fear of pain (xii. 2 5, 2 7, xvii. 19a). It is so human that it ;.s to pass over into us and become ours (xvii. 19b). All those texts clearly prove that Jesus, while on the earth, did not possess the attributes which constitute the divine state, and hence He can terminate His earthly career by claiming back again the glory which He had before His incarnation (xvii. 5). How is such a self-deprivation on the part of a Divine Being conceivable 1 It was necessary, first of all, that He should consent to lose for a time His self-consciousness as a divine subject. The memory of a divine life anterior to His earthly existence would have been incompatible with the state of a true child and a really human development. .And in fact the Gospel texts nowhere ascribe to Jesus a self­ consciousness as Logos before the time of His baptism. The word which He uttered at the age of twelve (Luke ii. 49) simply expresses the feeling of an intimate relation to God and of a filial consecration to His service. With a moral fidelity like His, and in the permanent enjoyment of a corn- 398 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS, munion with God which sin did not alter, the child could call God His Father in a purely religious sense, and apart from any consciousness of a divine pre-existence. The feeling of His redemptive mission must have been developed in His earliest years, especially through His experience of the con­ tinual contrast between His moral purity and the sin which He saw staining all those who surrounded Him, even the best, such as Mary and Joseph. The only healthy one in this caravan of ,,ick with whom He was travelling, He must early have discovered His task as healer of humanity, and have inwardly consecrated Himself thereto without any reserve. Besides, there is not a saying, not a deed in the gospel history, which ascribes to the infant Jesus the consciousness of His divine nature and of His previous existence. It is to the apocryphal gospels that we must go to seek this contra­ natural and anti-human Jesus. .According to the biblical account, the Logos, in becoming incarnate, did therefore really put off His consciousness of His divine being, and of the state corresponding to it. This self-deprivation was the negative condition of the incarnation. Here are the positive conditions of the fact ; it is enough to compare them with the well-known features of the Gospel history to judg1o whether they have been really fulfilled. 1. Man was created in the image of God, as an intelligent, free, and responsible being. Such, therefore, was the limit of the abasement to which the divine subject stooped ; for He must descend to the level of man, not beneath him. He lowered Himself to the state of a human personality, destined to work out His development under the conditions deter­ mined by man's destination to the divine likeness. 2. The fundamental feature of God's image in man being aspiration Godwards, and receptivity for the divine, this characteristic must be predominant in the human develop­ ment of this radically divine personality. 3. The limits of our individuality impress a relative cha­ racter on the receptivity for the divine belonging to each of us. But, in consequence of His miraculous birth, the Logos, while entering into humanity, reproduces not the type of a determinate hereditary individuality, but that of the race itself in its essence and generality. His receptivity for the THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS IN THE PROLOGUE. 3 9 !J

-divine, HiR religious and moral capacity, is thus not merely that of any individual man-it is that of the whole species ,which became concentrated in His person, as it had once been in the person of the father of the race. He will thus be able to receive from above not only what each individual, but what the whole of humanity, is fitted to receive and possess from God. And if this collective receptivity is absolute and infinite,-in a word, like its object,-the man who concentrates it in His person will infallibly attain to .the power of saying, " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father," and to possess in Himself " all the julness of the ·Godhead" (xiv. 9 ; Col. ii. 9). 4. Finally, if humanity is eternally destined to share the divine state,-in other words, if the true man, in the divine · idea, is the God-man,-the highest aspiration of the Logos in His human life must have been first to realize in Himself this participation of humanity in the divine state,-this is the meaning of recovering His glory,-and then to make all His brethren sharers of it by reproducing in them His glorified humanity. Such is the realization of the gift of us which the Father has made over to Him (xvii. 2), the accomplish­ ment of our eternal predestination (Rom. viii. 2 9). On such conditions the entrance of a divine subject into the human state, and His development, do not appear to us to contain .anything contradictory. Let us then attempt to mark out the phases of the terrestrial -0.evelopment of Jesus Christ from this point of view, as well as the mode of His. gradual restoration to the divine state. By the birth of such a being as a member of the race, as son of man, humanity becomes restored to its normal point of departure ; it is fitted again to enter upon a development which has not been falsified by sin. Up to the age of thirty Jesus fulfils this task. By His perfect obedience and constant sacrifice of self He raises humanity in His person from inno­ cence to holiness. He does not yet know Himself; perhaps in the light of Scripture He begins dimly to forecast what He is in relation to God. But the distinct consciousness of His diguity as Logos would not be compatible with the reality -of His human development and the accomplishment of the task assigned to this first period of His life. This task once 400 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS, fulfilled, the conditions of His existence change. A new work opens up to Him, and the consciousness of His dignity as the well-beloved Son, far from being incompatible with the work which He has still to carry out, becomes its indispens­ able basis. To testify of God as the Father, He must necessarily know Himself as the Son. The baptism is the decisive event which, begins this new phase.1 Anticipating the aspirations and presentiments of the heart of Jesus, the Father says to Him: "Thou art my Son." Jesus knows Himself from that moment to be the absolute object of the divine love. Henceforward He will be able to say what He could not say before : "Before Abraham was, I am." This consciousness of His dignity as Son, the revelation of His eternal essence, the reward of His previous fidelity, the background of all His subsequent mani­ festations (see the words of Weizsacker above, p. 395), is Hi& possession ; it accompanies Him everywhere from that hour. At the same time the heavens are opened to Him ; His eye pierces into the luminous abyss of the divine plans. He there beholds at every moment all that is necessary for the­ accomplishment of His Messianic task (v. 19, 20). He can speak now, for He can say : " We testify that we have seen.'' .Finally, humanity becomes elevated in Him to spiritiial life,. the advent of which on the earth demanded an organ like Him : the Holy Spirit descends upon Him ; with the propaga­ tion of this higher life before Him, Christ feels Himself from this moment Master of all things, and starts on His career as the Messiah and Saviour of the world. Yet His baptism, while restoring to Jesus His consciousness of sonship, did not restore to Him His filial state, the divine form of God belonging to Him. There is an immense dis­ proportion between what He knows Himself to be and what He is really. Therein there will be for Him the possibility of temptation; therein the work of patience. Master of all, He possesses nothing. No doubt He lays out on His work

1 Since the time the Gnostics falsified the meaning of the baptism by making it the epoch of the descent of the divine Eon upon the man Jesus, M. de Rouge­ mont is the first who has ventured to give the fact its full importance in the· rersonal development of our Lord. See Ohrist et ses temoins, 7e, Se, and 98' l€ttres, t. i. pp. 229-296, particularly pp. 250-255. THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS IN THE PROLOGUE, 401 treasures of wisdom and power which are in God, but solely because His believing and filial heart is constantly appealing to the fatherly heart of God. It was by His ascension that His return to the divine state was accomplished, and that His position was at last raised to the level of the self-consciousness which He had from His baptism. From that time He was clothed with all the attri­ butes of the divine state which He possessed before His incarnation ; but He was clothed with them as the Son of man. All the fulness of the Godhead henceforth dwells in Him, but humanly, and even as Paul says, BODILY (Col. ii. 9). Ten days after His personal assumption into the divine glory, He begins to impart it to His church by the communication of the Spirit, who renders her capable of being one day made a partner in the divine state which He enjoys Himself. The Parousia will consummate the work thus begun. The first word of history : " Ye shall be as gods," will thus be the last. Living images of the Logos from our creation, we shall realize at the close of our development that type of divine human existence which we at present behold in Him. Placing our­ selves toward Him in the same state of receptivity in which He constantly stood toward the Father (vi. 57), we shall see His highest wish fulfilled in us : "Father, I will that they als(} b"' with me where I am" (xvii. 24). Thus the divine plan is presented as it has been realized in Jesus. The true formula, then, of the incarnation, as it is embodied in the Gospel of John, is. the following :-THE LoGos REALIZED IN JESUS, IN THE FORM OF A HUMAN EXISTENCE SUBJECT TO THE LAW OF TIME AND PROGRESS, THAT RELATION TO GOD OF PERFECT DEPENDENCE AND FILIAL COMMUNION WHICH HE REALIZED BEFORE HIS INCARNATION IN THE PERMANENT FORM OF DIVINE LIFE.1 Let us cast a glance at the relation of the Logos to God Himself, before the incarnation.

1 We should not like to hold M. Gess as at one with all the ideas which w~ here express. We know that on several points we are not wholly agreed. But, nevertheless, the point of view which we take up is in general that which he has developed in his beautiful work : Lehre von der Per8on Christi, 1856, which I ha.d the honour to review at the time of its appearance, Revue chretienne, 1857

What was the form of existence belonging to the Logos iu God? The school of Baur in our day establishes a contrast between John's conception and that of Paul on this point. Paul, they say, sets forth a Christ pre-existing as a celestinl 1nan, but not as a divine being; while John's conception expressly transcends this view. We have already seen that, in 2 Cor. viii. 9 and Phil. ii. 6, Paul expresses a conception of the pre-existence of Christ exactly similar to John's. Holsten himself now acknowledges this as far as the Epistle to the Philippians is concerned. He can therefore maintain a contradiction between the two apostles only by denying this Epistle to be Paul's.1 And on what passage do Baur and his school found this alleged difference ? On 1 Cor. xv. 4 7 : " The second 1nan is from heaven ; " as if this passage, like the entire chapter, had not an eschatological signification ! St. Paul is speaking not of the pre-existing Christ, but of Jesus now glorified, and as He will return from heaven to make His own like Him, as appears clearly from the words following in v. 48 and 49: "As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy; and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly." We shall not bear the imago of the pre-existing Christ, but certainly that of the glorified Christ. Paul's teaching on the pre-existence (comp. especially 1 Cor. x. 4 and viii 6) is therefore, in an original form, and with expressions independent of those of John, identical in substance with the teaching of the latter. When Paul calls the pre-existing Christ the image, of the, invisible God, he says the same as John when he designates Him by the name of the Word. These two expressions con­ tain, above all, the idea of an operation ad intra, accomplished in the depths of the divine essence: God affirming, with an etemal affirmation, all that He thinks, wills, and loves, in u being who is the word of His thought, the reflection of Hi.s being, the object of His love, His Word, His image, His Son. And this Word is not a simple verbum volans : He is a living being, a person who-if we could apply to God an 1 Jahrb. fur prot. Theol. 1876, first part (second article on the Epistle to th• Philippians). THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS IN THE PROLOGUE, 403

-expression which is only appropriate to man-should be called IIis realized ideal. Let us imagine an artist giving life to the masterpiece in which he has embodied all the fulness of his genius, and having power to enter into personal relation with it: such is the relation between God and the Word.. This Word can only be d·ivine; for the highest affirmation of God ~annot be less than God Himself. He must be eternal ; for .an affirmation which belongs to the being of God cannot have had a beginning. This Word being God's absolute enunciation, His only saying, His primordial and sole utterance, in which are contained all His particular utterances, every subsequent word which will re-echo in time is primarily contained in Him, and will only be realized through Him ; He is the creative word : " In Him all things consist (Ev airr(j, uvveu7"1}Ke 'Tit 7TavTa)," says St. Paul also, Col. i. 17. In pronouncing the word, or, what comes to the same thing, in begetting the Son, God has expressed His whole being; and it is this Word who, in His turn, will call all beings out of nothingness. They will all be His free affirmation, as He Himself is that of God. By means of the universe, the Word displays in time the whole wealth of the divine treasures which God has eternally put within Him. Creation is the poem of the W or

From this notion of the person of Christ, there follows the supreme importance of His appearance on the earth. If He is the Word made flesh, He is the absolute revelation and communication of God to humanity, eternity come down into time, all the treasures of God brought within the reach of faith. After this gift of the Father, there is nothing better to wait for. There remains for humanity only one alternative : to accept Him and live, or reject Him and perish. But if this supreme dignity of Jesus is denied, His mani­ festation has only a relative value ; Christianity, as has been Baid, is no more than one of the stages of humanity.1 How­ ever admirable Jesus Christ may be, humanity may and ought always "to wait for another." For the path of progress is in­ definite. The door remains open to an after-comer, and the church has nothing for it but to wait for the accomplishment of that terrible prophecy uttered by Jesus : " I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not; if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive I" (v. 43). The question is therefore a vital one for the church and the world ; and it is easy to understand why John has placed this prologue at the head of his narrative. Faith is not faith, that is to say, absolute or without after-thought, unless it ha& for its object that beyond which it is impossible to go.

Before leaving the prologue, we must again call the atten­ tion of our readers to the numerous and palpable errors of the· oldest manuscripts, the Sinai:ticus and the Vaticanus, especially the former, in this piece. The reader may refer to ver. 4 (-row av0poYTrruv), ver. 5 (E

I. 19-IV. 54. fiRST :MANIFESTATIONS OF THE WORD.-THE BIRTH OF FAI1'H.­ FIRST SYMPTOMS OF UNBELIEF.

OMPARED with the two following parts, one of which C specially traces the development of unbelief (v.-xii.), the other that of faith (xiii.-xvii.), this first part has a more general character. It serves as basis and point of departure for the two others. Jesus is declared to be the Messiah by John the Baptist; a first group of disciples is formed round Him. His glory shines forth in some miraculous manifestations in the circle of private life. Then He inaugurates His public ministry in the temple at Jerusalem. But this attempt being frustrated, He confines Himself to teaching while working ·miracles, and to gathering round Him new adherents by means of baptism. Finally, observing that even in this more modest form His activity gives offence to the dominant party at Jerusalem, He retires to Galilee, after sowing by the way the germs of faith in Samaria. This summary is enough to justify the title which we have given to this whole first part, and to show its mixed character as compared with those following. The evangelist himself seems to have meant to divide it into two cycles by the well-marked correlation between the two remarks: ii. 11 and iv. 54, placed, the one at the end of the narrative of the marriage at Cana : " This beginning oj miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth His .glory ; and His disciples believed on Him there ; " the other, which concludes this entire part, after the healing of the nobleman's son: "This is again the second miracle that Jesus aid, when He was come out of Judwa into Galilee." By the ,evident correspondence of those two sayings, the evangelist -shows that there were in those first times of the ministry of ~06 406 GOSPEL OF JOHN.

,Tesus two sojourns in Judrea, which both ended in a return to, Galilee, and that each of those returns was signalized by a. miracle wrought at Cana. This evidence of the historian's mind ought to be our guide. We therefore divide this first part into two cycles : the one comprising the facts related i. 19-ii. 11 ; the other, the narratives ii. 12-iv. 54. In the­ first, Jesus, introduced by John the Baptist to His ministry, carries it out without going beyond the inner circle of Hise first disciples and His family. The second relates His first. steps in His public ministry.

FIRST CYCLE.

I. 19-JI. 11.

This cycle embraces three sections : 1st, The testimony rendered to Jesus by John the Baptist, i. 19-3 7 ; 2d, The first. personal manifestations of Jesus and the faith of His first dis­ ciples, i. 38-52; 3d, His first miraculous sign, ii. 1-11. The­ facts related in these three sections cover a week, which, as­ Bengel has remarked, may be considered the counterpart of the final passion-week. The one might be called the Messianic bridal week; the other is the time of separation which was announced from the beginning by Jesus : " When the bride­ groom shall be taken away, then shall the .friends of the b1-ide­ groom .fast."

FIRST SECTION.

J, 19-87.--THE TESTIMONIES OF JOHN '.rHE BAPTIST.

These testimonies are three in number, and were given on threb successive days (see vv. 3 9 and 3 5 : " The next day"). These three days, ever memorable to the church, had left an ineffaceable impression on the heart of the evangelist. On the first he had heard the forerunner solemnly proclaim before a deputation of the Sanhedrim that the Messiah was present,. CIIA.P. I. 19-28. 40'7

but unknown by every one except John himself (ver. 26); and this saying had sent a thrill through him as well as through the assembled multitude. On the morrow, a day more important still, Jesus had been pointed out personally by His forerunner as the Messiah ; and faith, trained by the declaration of the preceding day, had enlightened with its first ray the heart of John and that of all the Baptist's hearers. Finally, on the third day, in consequence of a new declaration given forth by his first master, John had left him to join the new Master whom he pointed out to him. Why did the author choose the first of those three days as the starting-point of his narrative 1 If it is true that the object of his narrative, as we have concluded from his own declaration, xx. 30, 31, is to account for the manner in which the faith was formed which the apostles now proclaim thl'ough­ out the whole world, and that in order to develope the same faith in his readers, we cannot but own that here is really the normal starting-point for his history. Faith did not at all begin with John's baptism, not even with the baptism of Jesus. The three days which are here described by the evangelist were not merely the birthdays of his own faith and of that of the apostles, but of fai.th in general within the bosom of humanity. The Messiah proclaimed, then pointed out, finally /allowed: such is the course of the narrative.

I. First Testimony.-Vv. 19-28. When unfolding the contents of faith in his prologue, the apostle had produced a testimony given by John the Baptist which contained, as Baur well says, " the idea of the absolute pre - existence of the Messiah," and consequently the real thought of the prologue, that of Christ's divinity. It is that testimony, quoted at ver. 15, which he now proceeds to relate, indicating the place and day when it was delivered. Rather we should say the days ; for the testimony is not merely that of the first day (vv. 2 6 and 2 7). It is also and especially, as we have already seen, that of the day following (ver. 30). When repeating, on the latter day, his declaration of the pre­ vious evening, the forerunner completed it, and gave it forth exactly as it is reproduced in the prologue. 408 GOSPEL OF JOHN,

Ver. 19. "And this is the record of John, when 1 the Je1vs sent 2 priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask Him, Who art Thou l " It is strange to find the narrative beginning with and. But this is explained by the connection which we have just indicated between the following narrative and the testi­ mony quoted ver. 15. The narrative strikes its roots, so to speak, into the prologue. Is not the faith expressed in the saying of ver. 15 exactly that whose origin and development the history is about to trace 1 Kal aih'T/ may be thus para­ phrased: "And this is the tenor of the record." . . . What gave to this declaration of John the Baptist a peculiar im­ portance was its official character. It was given forth in presence of a deputation of the Sanhedrim, and in reply to an express question proceeding from that body, the religious head of the Jewish nation. The Sanhedrim, of whose existence we find no earlier traces than in the times of Antipater and Herod (Josephus, Antiquities, xiv. 9. 4), was no doubt a con­ tinuation or renewal of a more ancient institution. We are reminded of the tribunal of seventy elders established by Moses (Num. xi. 16). Under Jehoshaphat (2 Chron. xix. 8) there is also mention made of a supreme tribunal sitting at Jerusalem, and composed of a certain number of Levites, priests, and fathers of Israel. Comp. probably also E,1ek. viii. 11 et seq. : " Seventy men of the ancients of the house of Israel." In Maccabees (1 Mace. xii. 6 ; 2 Mace. i. 10, iv. 44, etc.) the body called ryEpovula, senate, plays a part similar to that of those ancient tribunals, though we cannot establish a historical continuity between those institutions. In the time of Jesus, this senate, called the Sanhedrim, was composed of seventy-one members, including the president (Tract. Sanhed. i. 6). These members were of three classes: 1st, The chief priests (apxieplic;),-a term which probably denotes the ex­ high priests and the members of the highest sacerdotal families; 2d, The elders of the people (npe

I Origen reads .. , .. , once ; elsewhere, ...,. 9 B C, Jtaliq., Syr., 11,nd other vss. add after o:or,.-...,;.o:, : ~," ._.., CHAP. L 19. 409

1 vresided l'1lJ oificio. The Sanbedrim had till now winked at the work of John the Baptist. But seeing that things were -daily taking a graver turn, and that the people began even to ask if John were not the Christ (comp. Luke iii. 15), they thought themselves bound at length to use their powers, and to put him to an official examination about his mission . .Jesus (ver. 33) refers to this step, which at a later period formed the ground of His own refusal to reply to a similar foterrogatory (Matt. xxi 23 et seq.). The Mishna says ex­ pressly, that "the power of judging a tribe, a false prophet, and .,a chief priest, pertains to the tribunal of the seventy-one."­ .Sanhed. i 5. The designation " the Jews" plays an important part in the fourth Gospel. This name, according to its ety­ mology, properly denotes only the members of the tribe of .Judah; but after the return from the captivity it was applied to the whole people, because the greater part of the Israelites who returned belonged to this tribe. It is in this genera1 sense that we find it ii. 6 : " After the manner of the purify­ ing of the Jews ; " ii. 13 : " The Jews' passover ; " iii. 1 : " A ruler of the Jews." In this political sense the term may even be extended to the Galileans: vi. 52. But the name in our -0-ospel takes a religious signification. The author attaches to it the notion of a more or less pronounced antipathy to Jesus .and His cause ; and that quite naturally, for the centre of the hostility to which Jesus was subjected was at Jerusalem, and in the province of Judea. From this odious sense which the author attached to the name of Jew, it has been attempted to prove that he could not himself belong to this nation.2 But after the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jewish nation, politi­ .cally regarded, ceased to exist ; and John, belonging himself in faith to a new community, could well speak of the Jews, in a religious sense, as of a body which had become alien to him. The Judreo-Ohristian apostle is still more severe in the Apocalypse to his old fellow-countrymen, whom he calls "the S'.1Jnagogile of Satan " (iii. 9). The words, from Jerusalem, 1 The old view, according to which the Sanhedrim had an elective president ,i\lld vice-president (the Nasi and the Av-Beth-Din), seems now to hava been ~efuted by Kuenen and Schurer. See Lehrbuch der neutest. Zeitgesch., by :.Schtirer, sec. 123. 2 Fischer, Tii.binger Zeitschrift 1840, and so Hilgenfeld. We have refuted this ,objection in the Introd. p. 171. 410 GOSPEL OF JORN. depencl not on the word the Jews, but on the verb sent. The, intention of this regimen is to bring out the solemnity or the course taken ; it proceeded from the centre of the theo­ cracy. Levites were joined with priests. It has often been thought that they played only the part of officers. But in several passages of the Old Testament (2 Chron. xxii. 7-9, xxxv. 3; Neh. viii. 7), it appears that it was the Levites who were charged with instructing the people in the law ; whence Hengstenberg has concluded, not without reason, that the scribes so often mentioned in the New Testament belonged generally to this order, and that in this character, and conse­ quently as members of the Sanhedrim, some of them figured in the deputation. The question which they put to John the· Baptist refers to the expectation, at that time reigning in Israel, of the Messiah, and the extraordinary messengers who were to­ precede His coming. " Who art thou?" signifies in the con­ text : What expected person art thou ? We shall see in ver. 25 what perplexity this question was fitted to cause John if he refused to declare his title. Origen, who, as we have seen, placed the last three verses of the prologue in the mouth of John the Baptist, believed, consequently, that the following testimony (ver. 19 et seq.) was a new one later than that of vv. 15-18. He therefore put a period after the word John, undoubtedly converting these first words: "And this is the record of John," into an appendix to the preceding testimony. Then, with the 8Te,. when, or the -roTe, then (for so he thought he might modify the text), he began a new proposition, the main text of which was to be found at ver. 20 : "he confessed." But the ,ea(, and, before this verb, renders such a construction impossible. For never is the copula ,ea{ in John the sign of the apodosis, not even in vi. 5 7. As to the change of 8Te into -roTe. it is entirely arbitrary. We shall see afterwards the con­ sequences of all those exegetical errors of Origen. The, words 7rpo~ avT6v, to him, added by some of the Alexan­ drines, are justly condemned by Tischendorf, Meyer, etc. Meyer is wrong in making the ,cal r1µ,oXoryriu-e still depend: on che. This construction would make the sentence drag heavily. Ver. 20. "And he confessed, and denied Mt; and con- CHAP. I. 21 411 fessed,1 I am not the Christ." 2 Before stating the content~ of ,T ohn's answer, the evangelist indicates its characteristics : it was ready, frank, and categorical. The first " he confessed ,,. indicates in e:'.fect the spontaneity and eagerness with which the declaration was made. The same thought follows in a negative form, " he denied not," to show that he did not for an instant yield to the terr:ptation which he might have had to deny. Finally, the second " he confessed" is added to tha first in order to attach to it the profession which follows. This remarkable form of narrative (comp. i 7, 8) can only be explained from a regard to people who, in the circle in which the apostle lived, were inclined to give to the person of John the Baptist a higher importance than belonged to his real dignity. According to the reading of the Alexandrines and of Origen, we must translate: "It is not I who am the Christ." This answer would be suitable if the question had been: "Is it thou who art the Christ ? " But the question was simply, " Who art thou ? " and the true answer is consequently that which is found in the T. R. : " I am not the Christ ; " that ia to say : " I am something, no doubt, but not the Christ." Ver. 21. "And they asked him, What then? 11 Art thoit • Elias? And he saith, I arn not. Art thou the prophet ? And he answered, No." Several commentators understand the question rt ovv (what then?) in the same sense, or nearly the same, as the preceding : " What art tlwu, then ? " But it is unnatural to take the neuter rt in this sense. De Wette finds in these words only an adverbial phrase-: " What then!" This sense is insipid. Rather, with Meyer, we must under­ stand e

1 L omits ,.,.,, and N, Syr"'", Or. the seconu ,.,., .,µ.•"-•"1t11T1>. s N A B C L X .:i., I tP1•rique, Cop. Or. (thrice) read '"I., •.,,. ..,,.,, while eleven other Mjj. and the T. R. place "P..' before 'Y"'• 3 B reads .-. ••• ,,., ( What art thou, then?). 4 ~ B L reject o-v after "· GOSPEL OF JOHN, of the Gospels (Matt. xvi. 14; Mark vi. 15) prove that some other prophet of the ancient times besides was expected to reappear-Jeremiah, for example. Of these expected person - ages there was one who was specially designated tke prophet. Some distinguished him from the Messiah (John vii. 40, 41); others confounded him with the Messiah (vi. 14). The per­ sonage in question was undoubtedly the one to whom the promise applied given in Deut. xviii. 18 (the prophet like unto Moses). Of course the people did not think of a second Elias or a new Moses in the spiritual sense, as when the angel says of John the Ba]_)tist (Luke i. 17): "He shall go before Him in tke spirit and power of Elias." It was the pernon him­ self who was to reappear in flesh and bone. How could the Baptist have affirmed in this literal sense his identity with one or other of those ancient personages ? As to entering into the domain of theological distinctions, he could not ; and it was not in keeping with his character. His answer, therefore, on this point also must be negative. Vv. 22, 23. "They said, therefore, unto him, Who art thou ? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself? He said, I am tke voice of one cry­ ing in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias." The deputies had now exhausted the suppositions furnished by the generally received Messianic programme. It only remains to them to put to John a general question which forces him from the negative attitude which he has been maintaining: " Who art thou ? " that is to say: "What personage art thou ? " The extraordinary con.'.' duct of John in Israel formed a sufficient ground for t}.is question. John answers with a saying of Isaiah, which is at once the explanation and proof of his mission. The meaning of the proph~tic passage is this : Jehovah is on the point of appearing to manifest His glory. At the moment preceding His appearance, without any one showing himself on the scene, a voice is heard which invites IP.rael to prepare the way by which her Lord is to come. The event in question in this descril?tion is not the return from the captivity: it is the Messianic appearance of Jehovah. As in the East, before the arrival of a sovereign, the roads were made straight and lev~l, so Israel is to prepare for her divine King a welcome which CHAP. I. 22, 28. 413 s}rn,11 be worthy of Him ; and the function of the mysterious voice is to engage her on this preparatory work, lest the signal grace which is approaching should tum to judgment. John applies this saying of Isaiah to himself the more "\1-illingly, that it falls in perfectly with his desire to keep his person out of view, and to let nothing appear except his message: "a voice." The words in the wilderness may be connected, in the Hebrew as well as in the Greek, either with the verb which precedes : cry, or with that which follows: make straight. The sense is the same in either case, for the order sounds forth in the place where it is to be executed. The connec­ tion with the preceding verb is more natural, especially in the Greek Wilderness in the East denotes uncultivated spaces, those vast tracts which serve for pasture, and which are crossed only by winding paths, and not by roads worthy of a sovereign. Such is the emblem of the moral state of the people ; J ehovah's entrance is not yet prepared for in their hearts. A collective and national repentance can alone pave the way for Him. By fixing his abode in the wilderness, the forerunner meant to indicate more clearly, by this literal conformity to the prophetic emblem, the moral fulfilment of the prophecy. Does the form of quotation: "as said" ..., belong to the narrative of the evangelist or to the Baptist's ..'>Wll answer 1 In favour of the second alternative, it may be said that the forerunner had more need himself to prove his own claims at that time than the evangelist had so long after. To speak thus was, on the part of John, to deliver his man­ date and to declare his marching order. It was to proclaim to those deputies, experts in the knowledge of the law and the prophets, that if he was not personally any one of the expected personages, his mission was nevertheless directly connected with the near appearance of the Messiah This was all which, from a moral point of view, it concerned the Sanhectrim and the people to know. Both were forewarned. The preceding examination hare on the general role of John the Baptist. The deputation subjects him to a second and more special one relative to the rite of baptism introduced by him. The evangelist prefaces this new phase of the interview by a remark relating to the religious character of the members of the deputation. 414 GOSPEL OF JOHN.

Ver. 24. ".And they which 1 were sent were of the Pharisees." If we translate thus according to the T. R., which is supported by the majority of the Mjj., all the Mun., and most of the vss., making the participle a'lreO"m">.µhoi, defined by the art. oi, the subject of the phrase, the object of this remark can only be to explain the question which follows. It is the con­ stant habit of John thus to supply, at every succeeding stage, -the circumstances fitted to explain the narrative ; comp. i. 41, 45, iv. 30, ix. 14, xi. 5, 18, xiii. 23, etc. The Pharisees being the ultra-conservatives in Israel, none would be more offended than they at the innovation which John took the liberty of making by introducing baptism. Washings, no doubt, formed part of Jewish worship. Some even allege that Gentile proselytes were subjected to a complete bath on occasion of their passing over to Judaism. But the applica­ tion of this symbol of entire pollution to the members of the theocratic people was so strange an innovation, that it must have awakened in the highest degree the susceptibility of the authorities who were the guardians of religious rites, and very specially that of the party most attached to tradition. Besides, the Pharisaic element predominated in the deputation which the Sanhedrirn had chosen. We see also how skilfully planned was the course of examination : first of all, the question of his mission; thereafter, only that of the rite. The order of the narrative thus admits of a perfectly natural explanation; but Origen, still led astray here by the false interpretation which he had given of the end of the prologue, imagined that in ver. 24 an entirely new deputation was introduced, different from that of ver. 19 ; and that this deputation was sent ex­ clusively by the Pharisees. He therefore translated: "And there were also there some sent of the Pharisees." The art. o, should in this sense be rejected. And hence, no doubt, has arisen the reading of the Alex. MSS. which reject this word. But this explanation is inadmissible. It would assume that the deputies mentioned, ver. 24, remained there like mutes during the whole of the previous interview, which is absolutely improbable. .And even after the alteration of the true text, to which it is obliged to have recourse, it still remains gram­ :mat:wally very forced. 1 N A B C L a.nd Or. reject ., before ...... _f<,..._ CHAP. I. 25-27. 415

Ver. 25. "And they asked him,1 and said unto him, Why JJaptizest thou then, if thou be not the CMist, nor Elias, neither -the prophet?" 2 The strictest guardians of rites conceded to the Messiah or to any one of His forerunners the right of innovating in the matter of observances ; and if John had -declared himself one of those personages, they would have contented themselves with demanding his credentials, and would have kept silence about his baptism, which would be authenticated along with his mission. Indeed, this very verse -seems to prove that, founding on such sayings as Ezek. xxxvi. 25, 26, and Zech. xiii. 1, the Jews expected a great national lustration to inaugurate the kingdom of the Messiah. John the Baptist having expressly repudiated the honour of being -one of the expected prophets, the deputation was entitled now to put to him the question : " Why baptizest thou then ? " In the then there is included the connection of ideas which we have just established. According to the reading of the T. R., neither, nor, the thought is this : "The supposition that thou :art the Christ being set aside, thy baptism can be explained only on this, that thou art one or other of the two expected forerunners ; if, then, thou art neither the one nor the other, why ... etc. 1 " It was not easy to apprehend this delicate meaning of the disjunctive negation; and the difficulty gave rise to the Alex. correction ovoe, ovoe, nor, moreover, which is only tu .add negation to negation. The position of John the Baptist in relation to this question, after his previous answer, was difficult : Vv. 26, 27. "John arwwered them, saying. Yea, I baptize with water : 8 there standeth 4 one among you,6 whorn ye know /11.,0t ; He6 it is, who, coming after me, is preferred before -me,7 whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose." This 1 tt rejects ~P"'""~"'"' ...... , ,.,., (the copyist has confounded the two ,.,.,}. 1 Instead of'""'',.,,.,, which is read by the T. R., after the most of the Mjj. -and Mnn., the reading in A B C L and Or. (six times} is ••o• ,uo,. a ~ alone : " ,,.., .i.... ,, instead of ., .}.,.,,. 4 B L Tb : .-.-~"" (stat} ; ~ G : ,,,.,.11,.., (stetit) ; T. R. with all the others '.

,,a.Q"'Tf21'l-1'. 0 After µs,ros, T. R. reads l,, with all the authorities, except~ B C L and Or. -(ten times}, who reject this word. 6 T. R. reads after .. ~.m, ,..,,.., ,.,,,.,., with 13 Mjj. the Mnn. It. Vg. Syr. Or. {once); these words are rejected by K B CL Th, Syr"••, and Or. (six times). 7 After 'fX'f'"'S, T. R. adds •• ,µ,,,-po,I,. f'•• .,,,.,, • ..,, with the same authoritieli -aearly; these words are rejected by the same authorities which reject,..,,,.., , ....., 416 GOSPEL OF JOHN. answer has been judged somewhat obscure and embarrassecl. De W ette thinks even that it does not correspond with the­ question. The generally received explanation is this : " My water-baptism does not in any case impinge on that of the Messiah, which is of an entirely different nature ; it prepares for it merely." Thus John is represented as in a way apolo­ gizing to the Sanhedrim for his baptism in name of the more important baptism, that of the Spirit, which is to be carried out by the Messiah. But, in the first place, this would be to evade the question proposed ; and de W ette's criticism would be well founded. For the baptism of John was attacked in itself, and not because of its relation to that of the Messiah. Then the words ev ~OaTt, with water, would require to be placed first : " It is only with water that I baptize ; " and the Spirit-baptism would necessarily be mentioned in the follow­ ing proposition as an antithesis. Finally, it would not be in keeping with the Baptist's character to seek to shelter him. self under the insignificance of his function, and to pass off' his baptism as an inoffensive novelty. Everything is full of dignity, solemnity, and even threatening, in this reply, when rightly understood. It is meant to exhibit the gravity of the present situation, into the mystery of which he alone is ini• tiated, and in which he has a part so important to play. It is the continuation of his call to repentance, ver. 23: "Make straight the way of the L01·d," as well as the answer to the ques­ tion of the Pharisees. In the very fact that he announces to them the presence of the Messiah in the midst of them, their question is resolved. If the Christ is there, He is known by him and him alone,-the Messianic time has come ; he is its­ initiator, and his baptism is thereby justified. This conviction of the grandeur of the situation and of his function is expressed with energy in the E"f©, I, placed first, not as is thought in contrast to the Messiah,-for the entirely different baptism of the latter would require to be mentioned thereafter,-but in this sense: "You ask me why I baptize ? I do so, not with­ out knowing why : it is because He is there, mark it well, He­ for whom you wait ! " Therefore E"f©: "I, who know the­ situation of affairs." We have rendered the force of this pro­ noun by the affirmation yea, ! Such, also, is the reason why the­ verb I baptize is placed before the regimen : with water. Th& CHAP. I. 26 27. 1 417 dntithesis between water-baptism and Spirit-baptism is entirely foreign to this passage. According to this view, the oe, but, ought undoubtedly to be rejected, as it is by the Alex. This adversative particle has crept in under the sway of the sup­ posed antithesis between the two baptisms. The but might yet be supported in this sense : " I baptize with water, and I know well myself that it is a grave matter ! But I am not doing so lightly ; for He is present, He who should come." This sense appears somewhat forced. The words arriong you, accompanied, as they no doubt were, with a significant look, by which the forerunner seemed to search in the crowd for Him of whom he was speaking, must have produced profound emotion. The term l

1 The reading Bnd""" is found in almost all the Mjj., the most of the Mnn. It. Vg. Cop. syr-ci,, etc. Only the Mjj. K Tb U A n, some Mnn. Syi.. ••, read with T. R. Bnd"/!,"P"· 2 N, Sy1.... ,· add '""'"P'P after I,p),.,• .,. CHAP. I. 29-34. 419 almost all the old :MSS. read Bethany, but that having sought ,a place of that name on the banks of the Jordan, he had not found it, while a place was pointed out called Bethabara, where tradition alleged that John had baptized. It is there­ fore almost certain that the reading Bethabara was substituted for the original reading Bethany in a certain number of documents, and that the substitution is the work of Origen. The Roman war had made a host of ancient localities dis­ appear even to the very name. In the time of Jesus there -existed undoubtedly two Bethanys, as there were two Beth­ lehems, two Bethsaidas, two Antiochs, two Ramas, two Canas. Different etymologies are given of the name of Bethany, such as place of dates or of poverty, etc. These meanings may suit the Bethany near Jerusalem; as to the Bethany near the Jordan, it is more probable that its name is derived from Beth-Onijah (ii')~, navis), place of the ferry-boat (see Introd. p. 102). This last sense would almost coincide with that of Bethabara, place of the ford. Bethabara is named in J udg. vii. 24. This name was perhaps connected with the passage -of the children of Israel at this place on their entry into the land of Canaan.

II. Second Testimony.-Vv. 29-34. How are we to explain the fact that the deputies of the Sanhedrim left John without asking him who the person was to whom he referred 1 Either they did not care to know, or they despised the man who spoke to them in such a way. In either case, their unbelief would date from this event. After their departure the forerunner remained with his disciples and the multitude who had been present at the scene, and from the morrow onwards his testimony took a more categorical character. He no longer said simply, " The Messiah has come," but, seeing Jesus approaching, he said, "There He is l" He characterizes Him first as to His work (ver. 29), then as to His person (ver. 30); he relates afterwards how he came to know Him, and on what foundation the testimony rests which he gives to Him (vv. 31-33); finally, he shows the importance to his hearers of the act which he has just performed in un­ .burdening himself before them of such a message (ver. 34). 420 GOSPEL OF JOHN.

Ver. 29. "The next day he 1 seeth Jesus corning unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." The very next day after that on which John had proclaimed the presence of the Messiah among the people, ,Jesus approached His forerunner, who recognised Him and declared Him to be the Messiah. The words : coming to him,. have perplexed commentators. Some have wrongly under­ stood: to be baptized (see above). Baur saw in them no other meaning than the following : to receive John's testi­ mony, and naturally found in this detail a proof of the purely ideal character of the narrative. But what does the fact assume '? Wbat is perfectly simple - namely, that Jesus, after having been baptized, previously to this meeting had removed from John for a certain time, and after the interval He returned on this very day to His forerunner. Now this is exactly what is confirmed by the synoptical account. Jesus, after His baptism, had in fact retired to the solitude of the desert, where He passed several weeks, and it was now that He reappeared to begin His work as Redeemer. That with this intention He should return to the presence of John, is of all things the most natural. Was it not he who was to open up the way for Him to Israel ? and was it not beside him that He might hope to find the instruments who were indis­ pensable to Him for the accomplishment of His task? Jesus­ Rimself (x. 3) describes John as the porter who opens the door of the fold to the shepherd, so that he has not to climb over the wall of the enclosure like the robber. The words : coming unto hirn, are therefore perfectly in keeping with the situation, and do not at all refer to a simple walk invented as a basis for the testimony which follows. Comp. Lticke, who­ also connects this detail with the account of the temptation. On the one hand, the designation which John used to point out Jesus as the Messiah must certainly have been intelligible to those who surrounded him ; on the other, it must be in accordance with the impression which he had himself received on the occasion of his first meeting with

1 The words • Io11m~,; of the T. R., which are omitted in a large number of Mjj. and Mnn., as well Alexandrine as Byzantine, and in most vss., are one of those additions, frequent in the By:i:antine text, which have been brought about by th~ necessities of reading in public worship. CHAP. I. 29, 421

.fosus. To fulfil the first of these conditions, the expression : '' the La11i6 of God," must contain an allusion to some saying or deed of the Old Testament usually referred to the Messiah. The interpretation of the term which best satisfies this con­ dition is certainly that according to which John the Baptist here reminds his hearers of the Servant of the Lord, described Isa. liii. Before the polemic against the Christians had driven .Jewish commentators to another explanation, they referred the passage Isa. Iii. 13-liii. 12 to the Messiah. This is the unanimous admission of Kimchi, Jarchi, .Aben Ezra, and Abar­ banel. The last mentioned says : " Jonathan, the son of Usiel, referred this prophecy to the Messiah who is to come; .and this is also the opinion of our sages of happy memory." (See Eisenmenger, Entdeekt. Judenth. II. Th. p. 758; Lucke, vol. i. p. 406.)1 We need not demonstrate here the truth of this explanation, and the insoluble difficulties which beset every contrary interpretation. It is enough for us that it prevailed among the ancient Jews. Thence it follows that the Baptist's allusion could easily be understood. The Servant -0f the Lord is represented in that chapter as " bearing on Him­ self alone the iniquity of us all," and described in ver. 7 in these words : " He is led as a lamb to the slaughter, as a sheep :/Jejore her shea1·ers is dumb." From those two sayings of Isaiah taken together there results directly the designation used on this solemn occasion by John the Baptist. Some ~ommentators have alleged that the word lamb, both here and· in Isaiah, denoted only the perfect gentleness of Jesus, His patience under suffering, without any reference to the idea of sacrifice. So Gabler : " Here is the man full of gentleness, who will patiently bear the ills to which He shall be sub­ jected by human perversity ; " and Kuinoel : " Behold the innocent and pious being who will take away wickedness

1 Comp. especially Wunsche, die Leiden des Messias, 1870, p. 55 et seq. By a multitude of rabbinical sayings he furnishes proof that the passages Isa. Iii. 13-liii. 12, Zech. ix. 9 (lowly, riding on an ass), and xii. 10 (" on me whorn .they have pierced"), were from time immemorial unanimously referred to the Messiah and His expiatory sufferings. The very attempt to distinguish between two Messianic personages, the one the son of Joseph or Ephraim, whose lot is to suffer ; and the other the son of Judah, to whom the glory is ascribed, is only a later expedient (datmg from the second century; comp. Wii.nache, p. 109) to t"eConcile this undisputed interpremtion with the idea. of the glorious Messiah. 422 GOSPEL OF JOHN. from the earth ; " Ewald, nearly the same. But none of those explanations sufficiently accounts for the art. o, tlu; known, expected larrw, nor brings out the relation established: by the text between the figure of the lamb and the act of taking away sin. Some commentators have supposed that the figure used by John was borrowed, not from Isa. liii., but from sacrifices generally in which the lamb was used as a. victim. But those sacrifices had not a relation to the Messiah special enough to make the name of which John makes use in this case sufficiently clear. There is but one sacrifice which could correspond in any degree to this condition, that, namely, of the paschal lamb. It is true, but mistaken in our opinion, that the expiatory character of the paschal sacrifice is denied. " The blood," saith the Lord (Ex. xii. 13), "shall be to you, /01· a token upon the lwiises where ye are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you t<> destroy you." How, after such a saying, can it be maintained that the blood of this lamb had no expiatory value ? " The­ paschal sacrifice," Hengstenberg rightly says, " was the basis of the whole sacrificial system, the basis of the ancient covenant itself. . • • Hence it possessed certain characters which the ordinary expiatory sacrifices had not-for example, the sacra­ mental feast, the emblem of communion with Jehovah. And this it is which has led commentators astray on the matter." But is it necessary to choose between the allusion to Isa. liii. and the reference to the paschal lamb ? Did not Isaiah himself borrow from the sacrifice of the paschal lamb the essential features in his picture of the Lord's Servant suffering for the expiation of the sins of the people ? The two explana­ tions are not, therefore, contradictory ; we need not even reject wholly the explanation given by Gabler, Ewald, etc. ; for it is indubitable that of the clean animals used as victims the lamb was that which, by its characteristic innocence and gentleness, presented the emblem most fully corresponding to the part of the Messiah, as it is here described by John the Baptist. Nevertheless, we persist in thinking, with Meyer, in opposition to Olshausen, Luthardt, Hofmann, that it is essentially on the delineation of the fifty-third of Isaiah that this expression rests , comp. Matt. viii. 1 7 ; Luke xxii. 3 7; Acts viii. 32 ; 1 Pet. ii. 2 2, et seq. The complement Tou Beou, of God, is the gen. CHAP. I. 29. 423 of possession ; in this sacrifice it 1s not man who offers and sacrifices; it is God who gives, and who gives of His own. Comp. 1 Pet. i. 19, 20 ; Rom. viii. 32. But after all those facts have been taken into account, the need is still felt of explaining the choice of the term by some personal impression on the mind of the forerunner. And for this end it suffices to recall what must have passed between Jesus and him on occasion of the baptism. Every Israelite, before receiving this seal, required to confess his sins to John the Baptist ( comp. Matt. iii. 6 ). Jesus on presenting Himself, like every other Jew, should have done what every neophyte did. How was this possible '? Not being able to confess His personal sin, He unfolded, no doubt, that of Israel, that of the world as He understood it, before the astonished view of John. This de­ scription, traced with the unequalled holiness, love, compassion, and gentleness of Jesus, must have made a deep impression on John, whose knowledge and love were beneath the level on which stood this unknown pilgrim. .And no doubt it was this contrast, vividly felt between himself and Jesus, which, amid all the Messianic designations which the Old Testament might have furnished him, led him to prefer this: " The Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." It is remark­ able that this title Lamb, under which the evangelist learned to know Jesus for the first time, is that by which the Saviour is designated preferentially in the .Apocalypse. The chord which had vibrated at this decisive hour within the very depths of his being, continued to vibrate within him to his latest breath. Commentators are not at one about the meaning of the word atpeiv (to lift, lift away) in our passage. Some hold that it expresses the notion of expiation. In this case we must translate : " Who bears the sin of the world." Comp. Isa. liii 4 : " He hath borne our griefs." Ver. 6 : " The Lord bath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." Ver. 11 : " He shall bear their iniquities," etc. Others allege, 1 John iii. 5 : " Ye l,,"now that Jesus Christ was manifested to take away our sins (tva 11pu)," and find here rather the sanctification of the world ; they translate : " Who bears away the sin " . . . If John had thought specially of the act of expiation he wonld probably have used the term foe£V, to bear, which the LXX. 424 GOSPEL OF JOHN. employ in the passages quoted. He is thinking, therefOl'e, rather of the removing of sin ; but how could he forget that, agreeably to the whole fifty-third of Isaiah, to which he is referring, this end can only be reached by means of expiation ? To remove the burden from those on whom it presses, He must needs charge Himself with it. The first explanation, there­ fore, contains the second. The pres. part. alpeofi, of God: "The Lamb whom God sends with the task of taking away." ... The burden to be removed is designated in a way which is imposing and sublime: the sin of the world. This substantive in the singular, the sin, presents the apostasy of humanity in its profound unity-that is, if we may so speak, sin in the mass, including all the sins of all the sinners on the earth. Do they not all spring from one and the same root ? We must beware of understanding by aµapTla, as de W ette does, the punishment of sin. This word embraces at once the punishment, the guilt, and the sin itself. It follows from the =ords : of the world, that the Baptist extends the influence of ~11e Messianic work to the whole of humanity. This idea has been regarded as too universalistic in such a mouth, and set down as due to the evangelist. It is certainly astonishing to find a scruple like this raised by authors who apply the fifty­ third of Isaiah to the Jewish people suffering for the sins of the Gentiles ! Had it not been said long before to Abraham : " In thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed " 1 And did not the still more ancient promise made to Adam: " Th~ seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent," contain the idea of the most absolute universalism ? The very mission of the prophets was to maintain this universalistic tendency within the bosom of theocratic particularism ; pro­ phetism was the counterpoise put by God Himself to the exclusiveness which might be engendered by the reign of the law. And who really are the kings and the many nation.5 (Gojim rabbim), Isa. Iii 15, who are made to exult by the CHAP. L 30. 42c

· -expiatory saerifice of the servant of the Lord, if they are not Gentile kings and all the nations of the world ? Comp. on this point the decisive and magnificent prophecy, Isa. xix. 24, 2 5. Are we to suppose the Baptist to have been surpassed in clearness of vision by Isaiah, he who was m01·e than a prophet? And what are we to suppose the meaning of that threatening or promise which the Synoptics put into his mouth, if it signifies anything : " God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham" ? It has been objected to the explanation which we have just given of this verse, that the idea of a suffering Messiah was not popularly known in Israel, as is proved by the passage .John xii. 34, where the people say that "the Christ abideth for ever." But the Messianic explanation of Isa. liii. was ad­ mitted by all ancient Jewish theology. This incontestable fact excludes the supposition that the idea of a suffering Messiah was foreign to the general conviction, though the expectation of the glorious Messiah was naturally the dominant thought in the carnal mind of the people. Prophecy was full -of contrasts of which it gave no solution; and the contradic­ tory elements existed side by side in the national sentiment. The forerunner, after describing the Messiah's work, points to the person of Jesus, in spite of its humble appearance, as -0orresponding to the contents of his declaration of the day before. Ver. 30. "This is He of whom 1 I said, After me coineth a man which preceded me; for He was before me." Not only does this £aying apply to Jesus, now present, the testimony pronounced in His absence (vv. 26, 27), but it is also intended to resolve the enigma which it contained. The solution, which the forerunner now adds for the sake of the well-affected cirde surrounding him, is contained in the words : for He was before rne. The eternal pre-existence of the Messiah really explains His actual presence and action previously to the appearance -0f John within the bosom of the theocracy (see on ver. 15 ). The sense as well as the authority of the documents supports the Received reading 7r€p[ ( and not v7re p). The word dvryp, this "'!nan, is here suggested to John by the sight of the definite f!erson whom he has before his eyes. Lticke and Meyer 1 Insteall of ""'P• (touching), M B C and Or. (twice) read ""''P (infavour of). 426 GOSPEL OF JOHN. think that in ver. 30 the forerunner is referring not to the­ preceding testimony (vv. 26 and 27), but to some other pre­ vious saying, which is neither reported in our Gospel nor in­ the Synoptics. But is it conceivable that the evangelist,. quoting two declarations, the one after the other, the second of which begins with the words : " This is He of whom r said" ..., had no intention by this latter to recall the former ?' The error of those two commentators arises from the fact that at ver. 27 they admitted the incomplete reading of the .Alex .• which, by rejecting the words : who was before me, renders thi& declaration so different from that of ver. 30, that it cannot be the reproduction of the other, and all the more that the last words, added on the second occasion to explain the enigma,. render the difference still greater. In vv. 31-3 3 the Baptist relates the circumstances which authorize him thus to bear testimony to the redeeming mission. and divine greatness of the man before him : Ver. 31. " .And neither did I know Him: but that He should: be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water." 1 The word ,cdryw, and neither I, placed first and repeated as it is ver. 33, has necessarily a peculiar emphasis. It is related to ver. 2 6 (" whom ye know not") : " And neithe1 did I know Him at that time (before His baptism)." It clearly follows from this that the words ov,c 'iJoetv, I knew Him not, refer to the knowledge of Jesus as the Messiah. This mean­ ing is likewise proved by the explanation which follows in this same verse, and which bears solely on the manner in.­ which the Messiah was to be revealed. But, it will be­ asked, could John, the son of Zacl1arias and Elizabeth, be­ ignorant of the miraculous circumstances which had signalized his own birth and that of Jesus ? .And if he did not know them, how happens it that in Matthew's account, on seeing J esns coming to him asking to be baptized, he answers : " I have need to be baptized of Thee, and eomest Thou to me" (iii. 14)? Who else than the Messiah could the Baptist regard as holier than himself 1 The first question is generally answered by saying that the accounts given by John's relatives were not sufficient to give him a divine certainty, such as that on which. his testimony needed to rest. This answer is well founded.- 1 B C G L P Tb A Or. reject ""' before ~! .. .,.,. CHAP. I. 31. 427

But there is more: John the Baptist having lived in the deserts till the time of his showing to Israel (Luke i. 8 O), might, no doubt, have heard his parents relate the peculiar circumstances of his birth and the birth of Mary's son. But he did not know the latter personally. Otherwise, in virtue of those very accounts, he must have known Him also as the Messiah. And if he did not know Him personally, how much less could those accounts tell upon the idea which he formed of His Messianic dignity at the hour of His baptism 1 And such is the full sense of the words : I knew Him not. Thereby alone is the testimony given to Jesus by John raised above every suspicion of partiality or arbitrariness. But then how are we to explain John's answer to Jesus in Matthew : " I have need to be baptized of Thee" ! Must we place it, according to the Gospel of the Hebrews, and as Lucke will have it, after the baptism, and that in opposition to our first Gospel? It has been thought, and not without ground, that at the moment when Jesus presents Himself to John, the view of one whose countenance sin had never tarnished arrested the forerunner, and drew from him the exclamation so strangely out of keeping with his mission. We think that we can answer the objection more satisfactorily. We have already observed that, according to Matt. iii. 6 and Mark i. 5, John's baptism was preceded by confession of sin on the part of the neophyte. A confession like that which the fore­ runner then heard from the mouth of Jesus might easily convince him that he had to do with one who hated and con­ demned sin, as he had never felt and condemned it himself. Thus is explained the exclamation of John, without the neces­ sity of supposing any previous personal relation between him and Jesus. The logical connection between the two propositions of the verse is easily established, when it is remembered that the revelation of the Messiah to Israel implied above all His manifestation to John himself, who was charged with the mission of proclaiming Him. The Synoptics assign to the ministry of the Baptist a more general object: to prepare the people for the kingdom of God by repentance; and here a contradiction has been alleged between them and our Gospel lJut the latter also admits this general object; see ver. 23 : -428 GOSPEL OF JOHN.

" To make straight the way of the Lord." Only John is here concerned to set forth that which forms the culminating point of his ministry, the proclamation of the person of the Messiah. All his work rightly seems to him to be concentrated in this supreme act. The article Trj, before iJoan, erroneously rejected by the Alex., has a certain dramatic force : " If I have come baptizing with that element (pointing to the Jordan), it is only with the view of manifesting Him who is to baptize with a higher element." .A whole scene was therefore supposed. between the two propositions of ver. 31, that of the revelation of the Messiah to John himself. This blank is filled up by the following verses : Ver. 32. ".And John bare recoi·d, saying, I saw the Spirit 4escending from heaven like 1 a dove, and it abode 2 vpon Him." This declaration is introduced with special solemnity by the words: .And John bare record. For it is here, as Hengsten­ berg says, that we find the punctum saliens of the whole ministry of John the Baptist, his Messianic testimony strictly so called. With what sense did John see ? With the eye of the body, or with the inner sense? This is to ask whether the fact mentioned here passed only in the spiritual world or also in the external world. In Mark's account (i. 10, 11) it is evidently Jesus who, at the moment when He goes up from the water, sees the heavens open and the Spirit descend on Him ; the same in Matthew (iii. 16, 1 7), whatever may be said by the majority of commentators. In Luke the narrative is completely objective : " It came to pass ... that the heaven was opened" ... (iii. 21, 22). He, moreover, remarks that the event happened in answer to the prayer of Jesus. But the Baptist is not excluded by the Synoptics from participating in the vision which John ascribes to him. Matthew's. account in­ directly associates him in it by the form of the divine declara­ tion: " This is my Son" (not as in Mark and Luke: " Thou art my Son " . . .). Besides, none of the four Gospels associates any other witness with this scene. If, then, the fact transpired in the sensible world, we must hold that Jesus and John were alone at that moment, which is not improbable,

1 Instead of .,,.,, which is read by T. R. with 8 Mjj., N .A. B C and 8 Mj,i read.,;. s ~ reads ,,,.,., mstead of ,,..,,. .. CHAP, L 32. 429-

as they were in the wilderness. However this may be, the fact related xii. 2 9 proves that an external phenomenon, even if others were present, would have produced in them only a vague wonder, and would not have had in their minds the signification which it might have for Jesus and for John himself (comp. also Acts ix. 7 and xxii. 9). As to the inward communication, it was addressed sim.ult-.aneously to Jesus and to John, as is shown by the two forms of the divine address : Thou art, and This is; and the objective reality of the com­ munication is definitely guaranteed by the circumstance that it was perceived at one and the same time by the two wit­ nesses. In the following way we may conceive of the rela­ tion between the perception of Jesus and that of John : the divine communication strictly so called (the address of the Father and the communication of the Spirit) passed between God and Jesus ; the latter had know ledge of the fact not only from the impression He received of it, but also from a vision which rendered it sensible to Him. John shared in this symbolical revelation of the spiritual fact. The voice, which sounded in the ear of Jesus in the form : " Thou art my Son," was heard by him in the form : " This is my Son." N eancler denies that a symbolical vision could find place in the life of Jesus. But this rule is not applicable before the time of the baptism. Here, then, we must distinguish two things : 1st, The real fact, which consisted in a new gift bestowed on Jesus, and which the narrative indicates in the words: the Spirit descend­ ing and abiding on Him; and 2d, The symbolical representa­ tion of the fact, intended for the consciousness of Christ Himself and for that of John, who was to bear witness of it: the heavens opened, the form of a dove. The divine address belongs at once to the fact itself and its sensible representa­ tion. Heaven, as we behold it with the bodily eye, is the emblem of a state perfect in holiness, knowledge, power, and happiness. Consequently it is in Scripture the symbol of the place where God manifests His perfections in all their brightness, where His glory shines fully, and whence all supernatural forces and divine revelations come down. From the azure of the skies, which is rent, John sees descending a luminous form 430 GOSPEL OF JOHN. like a dore, alighting and abiding on Jesus. This symbol of the Holy Spirit cannot be explained by any analogy borrowed from the Old Testament. In the Syrian religions the dove was the image of the force of nature which broods over all beings. But this analogy is too remote to explain our pas­ sage. Matt. x. 16, where Jesus says: "Be ye harmless as doves," has no direct connection with the Holy Spirit. We find some passages in the Jewish doctors where the Spirit who morcd on the face of the waters (Gen. i. 3) is associated with the Spirit of the Messiah, and compared to a dove brooding over its young without touching them (see Liicke, p. 426). This comparison, so familiar to the Jewish mind, probably explains to us the form of the divine revelation. The emblem admirably suited the decisive moment of the baptism of Jesus. In reality, the matter in question was nothing less than a new creation, the consummation of the first. Humanity was passing at that moment from the sphere of natural life into that of spiritual life, with a view to which it had been created at the first. The creating Spirit, who had, with His vivifying power, brooded over chaos to bring out o1 it a world full of order and harmony, was proceeding, as by a new incubation, to transform the first humanity into the king­ dom of heaven. But what we have, above all, to remark here is the organic form which the luminous apparition takes, An organjsm is an indivisible whole. At Pentecost the Spirit descends in the form of " cloven tongues" (ctaµ€pt~oµEvai 711,wua-at), which are divided among the faithful. Here is the symbol of the manner in which the Holy Spirit dwells in the church, dividing to every man severally as He will (1 Cor. xii. 11). But at the baptism of Jesus the fact is wholly different, and the emblem is also different. The Spirit de­ scends upon Christ in His fulness. " God," it is said, iii. 34, "giveth Him not the Spirit by measure." Comp. Isa. xi. 1, 2, where the seven forms of the Spirit, enumerated in order to designate His fulness, come to rest on the Messiah. Finally, we have to remark the word abide, which is an exact allusion to the word mJ in this passage of Isaiah (xi. 2). The pl'o­ phets received occasional inspirations : the hand of the Lord was upon them. Then, retiring, the Spirit left them to them­ aelves. So it was also with John the Baptist. But Jesus CHAP. I. SS. 431

.shall not receive merely the visits of the Spirit; He is th6 .dwelling- place of the Spirit in humanity, and the source from which He shall flow; hence the idea of abiding is put in dose connection with that of baptizing with the Holy Spirit (ver. 33). The reading a-et, more strongly even than ~c:;, emphasizes the purely symbolical character of the luminous appearance. The µ,evov of the Sinait. is a correction occa­ sioned by the preceding KaTafJa'ivov. The proposition is broken off designedly, in order to isolate and exhibit more dearly the idea of abiding. The construction of the acc. hr' .atm'w with the verb of rest lµ,etvev, is dictated by the living -character of the relation, as at vv. 1 and 18. Though the meaning of those symbols was evident, the Baptist feels the need of putting their signification on a yet surer ground than his own interpretation. Ver. 33. "And neither did I know Him: but He that sent tne to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining on Him, the same is He which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost." John wishes ,completely to banish the idea, that with his testimony he is mingling anything of his own. Not only had a sign been .announced to him (ver. 31), and he had seen a sign (ver. 32), but that sign was exactly the one which had been announced. Everything like human caprice is therefore excluded from the -interpretation of the sign which he gives. The repetition of the words: And neither did I know Him, is thus explained quite naturally. The expression & 7r€p,,frac:;, He that sent me, has in it something solemn and mysterious; it evidently means God Himself, who spoke to him in the wilderness, and gave him his commission. That commission embraced-lst, The command to baptize ; 2d, The promise that the Messiah should be revealed in connection therewith; 3d, The mention of the sign by which he should recognise Him ; 4th, The com­ mand to point Him out to Israel. The resumption of the subject by the pronoun e,ce'ivoc:;, He, with the forcible sense which it has in John, "that one Himself, and no other," is intended to exhibit Jehovah as the being from whom ,everything proceeds in this testimony. The words Jcp' &v &v indicate the most unlimited possibility: "The individwl. whoever he may be, on whom." The act of baptizing with 432 GOSPEL OF JOHN. the Holy Spirit is named as the essential character of the­ Messiah. He can do that for which John could only prepare : the one, by the baptism of water, awakes repentance and the­ desire of holiness ; the other, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, satisfie~ this desire, the most elevated within the human soul. Vv. 32 and 33 force on us the question, "Did Jesus really receive anything at His baptism 1" Meyer says, No, hold­ ing that this idea has no support in our gospel, and that if the Synoptics say more, it is because they contain an already altered tradition: "The real fact was solely the vision received by John the Baptist ; and this vision was transformed into the event related by the Synoptics." In this view, the idea of the communication of the Spirit would be incompatible with that of the incarnation of the Logos. Liicke and de W ette think that a permanent historical fact, the development of Jesus under the influence of the Holy Spirit, was revealed to John in the passing form of the vision. According, then, to those interpreters also, Jesus received nothing at that time. John was merely made aware of the constant communion. of ,Jesus with the Holy Spirit, in order to bear witness to it. Neander, Tholuck, Ebrard, recognise in this fact a step of pro­ gress wrought in the consciousness which Jesus had of Him• self. Others-B.-Crusius, Kahnis, Luthardt, Gess-allege a real communication, but only with a view to the task which Jesus had henceforth to discharge. He received the Spirit not for Himself certainly, but for the accomplishing of His ministry, and that He might communicate to men this heavenly gift. Meyer's view as well as Liicke's is contrary not only to the narrative of the Synoptics, which is sacrificed purely and simply to a dogmatic prejudice, but also to John's. For the vision of the Baptist, if it comes from God, must correspond to something. Now John saw the Spi1it not only abiding, but descending, and the one feature must have as much reality as the other. N eander's opinion is true, but defective. There was certainly effected at that time a deci­ sive progress in the consciousness of Jesus. This is indicated by the fact of the divine address : Thou art my Son. But, moreover, the fact of the descent of the Spirit must correspond to a real gift. Finally, the opinion which admits an actual CHAP. I. 33. 433 gift, but solely in relation to the public activity of Jesus which is about to begin, is superficial. In a life so thoroughly one as that of Jesus was, where nothing is purely ritual, where the external is always the manifestation of the inward, the beginning of a new activity supposes a change in the inner life. If Jesus has only from the date of His baptism the power of communicating the Holy Spirit, it is because He possesses the Spirit Himself from that time quite otherwise than He possessed it formerly. If we seize the idea of the incarnation with the same force as we see it understood and presented by Paul and John (see ver. 14 and the appendix to the prologue), it will suffice to overthrow those explanations which result from an orthodoxy more rational than biblical. If the Logos despoiled Himself of His divine state, and consented to become the subject of a truly human development,-that is to say, of the normal development originally destined for man,-the time must come for Him when, after having accomplished the task of the first Adam in the way of free obedience and love, He would see opening before Him the higher sphere of spiritual or supernatural life; and when, first of the violent who take the kingdom of heaven by violence, He would force the entrance to it for Himself and for all. Undoubtedly His whole exist­ ence had flowed past under the constant influence of the Holy Spirit who had presided over His birth. At every instart He had responded freely to the call of this divine guide, and this hourly docility had been immediately recompensed by a new spiritual impulse. The vessel was filled in proportion as it enlarged, and enlarged in proportion as it was filled. But to be under the influence of the Spirit is not to possess the Spirit (xiv. 1 7). With the hour of His baptism the moment came when His preceding development must pass into the ultimate state, that of His perfect statiire (Eph. iv. 13). "First that which is psychical," says Paul, 1 Cor. xv. 46, "and after­ wards that which is spiritual." That law must apply, if the incarnation is a reality, to the development of Jesus, even as to that of any other man. Till then the Spirit was upon Him (hr' avTo [To waiUov], Luke ii. 40); He grew under that divine influence in wisdom and grace. From His baptism onwards the Spirit becomes the principle of His psychical and :~l\U"\IT. 2 1<; JOHY" 434 GOSPEL OF JOUN. physical activity, His personal life; He can be called Himself the Lord-the Spirit (2 Cor. iii. 17, 18); q'tdckening Spii'il (1 0or. xv. 45). The baptism thus constitutes a crisis in His inner life as decisive as the ascension in His outward state. The heaven opened represents His initiation into the knowledge of God, and His designs. The voice, Thou art my Son, indicates the revelation to His inmost consciousness of His personal relation to God, of His eternal dignity as Son, and thereby of the boundlessness of the divine love toward Him, and toward mankind on whom such a gift is bestowed. He comprehends fully the name Father as applied to God, and can proclaim it to the world. The Holy Spirit, now become his personal life, makes Him the principle and source of life to all men. Nevertheless, His glorification is not yet; natural life, both of the soul and body, still exists in Him as such. Only after His ascension will His soul and body be completely spiritual­ ized (uwµ,a 'TT'IIEVP.,aTilCOV, 1 0or. xv. 44). But, it will be asked, does not the gift of the Holy Spirit repeat the work of the miraculous birth 1 By no means ; for, in the latter case, the Holy Spirit acts only as the life-giving force in the stead and place of the paternal principle. He awakes to the activity of life the germ of a human existence deposited in the womb of Mary, and prepares for the Logos, deprived of His divine state, the instrument in which he is to realize His earthly development; in the same way as on the day of creation the human soul, the breath of God the Creator, came to inhabit the body previously prepared by God from the dust of the earth (Gen. ii 7). Several modern theologians, in imitation of some Fathers, think that the Logos, or the Christ, is confounded with the Spirit by John. But every one will acknowledge as certain the truth of the remark made by Lucke : " No more could it be said, on the one hand, ' The Spirit was made flesh,' than it could be said on the other, ' I saw the Logos descend on ,Jesus.'" The distinction, which is scrupulously respected by John even in chap. xiv.-xvi., where M. Reuss regards it as sometimes wholly effaced (Hist. de la Ohret. t. ii. p. 533 et seq.), is this: The Logos is the principle of objective revela­ tion, and, after the incarnation, that revelation itself; while the CHAP. 1. 34. 435

Spirit is the inner principle by which we assimilate the reve­ lation. Hence it happens that, without the Spirit, revelation remains a dead letter to us, and Jesus a historical personage with whom we do not enter into communion. It is by the Spirit alone that we appropriate the revelation contained in the word and person of Jesus. And so, from the time that the Spirit performs His work in us, it is Jesus Himself who begins to live within us. .As, through the Spirit, Jesus when on earth lived by the Father, so through the Spirit the believer lives by Jesus (vi. 5 7). This distinction of functions between Christ and the Spirit is firmly maintained throughout our whole gospel.1 This solemn testimony given, the fore­ runner expresses the feeling of comfort with which the fulfil­ ment of his great task inspires him. Ver. 34. "And I (rnyself), I have seen, and have borne record, that this is the Son of God." ' The two perfects, I have seen and I have borne record, indicate facts accomplished once for all and remaining. The divine herald has done his work ; it is for the people now to do theirs-to believe. The tn, that, depends undoubtedly on both verbs. John in reality beheld in the baptism scene the divinity of Jesus. The term Son of God characterizes a being as representing the Deity in a peculiar function. It is applied in the Old Testament to angels, judges, kings, and finally, to the Messiah: " Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten Thee" (Ps. ii. 7, 12) ; which does not at all mean that the mode of representation is identical in every case. .An ambassador represents his sovereign, but certainly otherwise than the son of the latter, who in the case of this Sovereign represents His Father. Ver. 3 0 proves that the Baptist is here taking the word son in the highest sense which can be attached to it. .As to his hearers, the term coulu only produce in them a vague impression of mysterious greatness and divine majesty. The words, and I myself, express very energetically the gravity of the testimony borne by the very man whom God had called to this mission. 1 Hilgenfeld, identifying the descent of the Holy Spirit at the baptism with the coming of the Eon Logos into the man Jesus (according to the Valentinians), finds hero a trace of Gnosticism. This idea has not the slightest support in tbe text. 2 Instead of • ""' .,. •• ~ ..., N reads • ,,.,.,,,..,.,, .... ,.,,,, It is the only document which has this obviously untenable reading. 436 GOSPEL OF JOHN.

III. Third Testimony.-Vv. 35-37. Vv. 35, 36. "A.gain, the next day after, John stooJ. and two of kis disciples ; and looking upon Jesus as He walked, ke saith, Behold the Lamb of God ! " Holy impres­ sions, great thoughts, and an indescribable expectation, doubt­ less still filled, on the following day, the hearts of those who had heard the words of the forerunner. On the morrow, John was at his post, ready to continue his ministry as the Baptist. There is nothing to warrant de Wette's supposition, that the two disciples who stood with him had not been present at the scene of the preceding day. Far from favouring this idea, the brevity of the following testimony gives it the character of a reference to that of the day before. The expression e,c Trov µ,a071Twv, of his disciples, implies that he had a considerable number of them. Of those two disciples, the one was Andrew (ver. 40); it is difficult to think that the other was not the author of the account. A.11 the little details which follow have a special value only for him to whom they recalled the most decisive and happy hour of his life. That his person is kept anonymous, while all the other disciples are named, confirms this conclusion (Introd. p. 256 et seq.). There is a certain difference, in the relation of J es11.S to John, between this day and the day before. Then, He came to John as to the person who was to introduce Him to future believers. Now, the testimony is borne ; He has nothing more to receive from His forerunner than the souls whom His Father has prepared for Him; and, like the magnet which is passed through the sand to attract metal filings, He confines Himself to approach­ ing the group surrounding the Baptist, to decide the coming to, Him of some of those who compose it. The conduct of Jesus is thus perfectly intelligible, and regulated on God's plan. The church is not torn, she is gathered from the tree of the theocracy. A.s Jesus enters into the plan of God, the Baptist enters into the thought of Jesus. A. tender and respectful scruple might keep the two disciples beside their old master. The Baptist himself frees them from this bond, and begins to realize the saying which from that moment becomes his motto: "H6

1 ~ and B plat.e ,zu,,-,u before ,._.,,._,.,,,.,,, 2 Keim (i. p. 520) : "The fourth Gospel wholly ignores e. baptism of Jeall.!I by .John." a Zeitsch,r. of Hilgenfold, 1872, p. 156 et seq. 438 GOSPEL OF JOHN,

thereby to deny the truth of the synoptical accounts ; it is becaus& the one concern of the Baptist here was to authenticate the so im­ portant theocratic act, which he was carrying through in bearing Messianic testimony to Jesus. With this intention he had nothiug else to mention than what he had seen himself. The correlation of the two K

1 The expectation of a great prophet, who is not expressly designated as the :Messiah, may be established from the writing, entitled the .A.1sumption of Moses, composed in the years following the death of Herod the Great (comp. Wieseler, Stud. u. Kritiken, 1868, and Schiirer, Lehrbuch, etc., p. 540). In this work, which contains the most faithful picture of the spiritual state of the Jewish people at the very date of the birth of Jesus, there is announced (c. 14, trans. Latin, published by Ceriani) the coming of a supreme messenger, nuntius in 1rummo constitutus, whose hands shall be.filled, to work out the people's deliver­ ance. Moses himself receives only the name of great messenge1·, magnus nuntius (c. 18). This envoy will therefore be the final prophet, a Moses raised to the highest power. No other royal and Messianic title is ascribed to him. And it is even probable that the author, who was a zealot, did not admit a personal J\f essiah. and ratl;,e:r expecte(l a kinguom of God which should be organi.::ed as a ,1.,mor.rncy (Rd,ii:-rr, p. [,7]). 440 GOSPEL OF JOHN. sword of the former, shall fall under that of the latter." "The one shall not bear envy against thtl other, juxta fidem nostram," says Jarchi finally (ad Jes. xi. 13). These last words attest the high antiquity of this idea. III. M. Renan (Vie de Jesus, p. 108 et seq.) draws a fancy sketch of the relation between " those two young enthusiasts, full of the same hopes and hates, who could make common cause and mutually support one another.'' Jesus arrives from Galilee with "a small school already formed,"-where did the writer find any such thing either in John or the Synoptics 1 it is historical divination ;-John gives a full welcome to " this swarm of young Galileans," though they do not attach themselves to him, and form a separate group round Jesus. "There are not many examples, it is true," remarks M. Renan himself, " of the head of a school eagerly welcoming the person who is to succeed ''-or rather supplant him. But "is not youth ~apable of any self-sacrifice 1 ''-No; the manner in which the Baptist, at the moment when his star is most brightly in the ascendant, retires all at once, to leave the field open to one younger than he, and till then wholly obscure, is not to be explained by the natural generosity of youth. Conscious of his divine mission, John could not retire except before the divine revelation of a higher mission. The Baptist's conduct in relation to Jesus, as attested by our four evangelists, remains, to the historian who does not here recognise the work of God, an insoluble problem. Before closing, a word more on a fancy of Keim's. This critic alleges (i. p. 525) that, contrary to the Synoptic narrative (comp. especially Luke iii. 21 ), our Gospel makes Jesus the first of all who appear at the baptism of John.1 He forgets to quote his proof. We have established that John i. 19-28 assumes the priority of the baptism of Jesus and of the Baptist's ministry in the Synoptics. But sic volo, sic ;'ubeo I

S E C O ND SECT I O N.

I. 38-51.-BEGINNINGS OF THE WORK OF JESUS.­ BIRTH OF FAITH.

The testimony related in the first section was the condition of faith. We now see the birth of faith itself. It was in the outset the acceptance of divine testimony. But testimony is only a provisional bond between the believer and the object of faith. Faith only becomes living in the heart by direct contact with its object. That this contact may be effected, Jesus must manifest Himself to it; and then, from being 1 "Das vierte Evangelium kehrt die Dingu um, und lasst Jesum zuerst auf dlll' Stelle sein." CHAP: I. 88, 39. 441 living, it immediately becomes fruitful. The believer in his turn bears witness, and thus becomes the link of union between new hearts and Jesus. Such is the significance of the follow­ ing nanatives. They fall into two groups: the first, embracing what refers to the three earliest disciples, Andrew, John, an9- Peter (vv. 3 8-42) ; the second, what relates to Philip and Nathanael (vv. 43-51).

I. First Group.-Vv. 38-42.

We have just named John. .Almost all the adversaries of the authenticity of our Gospel themselves own that the author, in writing as he does here, wishes to pass himself off as an apostle. Even Hilgenfeld says: ".Andrew and an anonymous person, who is assuredly John." Ver. 38. "Then1 Jesus turned, and saw them following, and .saith, unto them, What seek ye ? They said unto Him, Rabbi {which is to say, being interpreted, Mader), where dwellest Thou?" Jesus, hearing steps behind Him, turns round. He sees the two youths following, with the desire of accosting Him, but without venturing t-0 take the first word. He anticipates them : " What seek ye?" This question, like so many other concise and pro­ found sayings of Jesus contained in this piece, has a meaning beyond its immediate sense. He who puts the question knows that the seeking of Israel and the sighs of humanity tend to Him. The disciples, by replying : " Master, where dwellest Thou?" modestly express their desire of speaking with Him in private. The title Rabbi is undoubtedly much inferior to that which the testimony of John revealed to them as His due. But for the moment they would not dare to use another. .And this title expresses, further, in a delicate way their intention to offer themselves as His disciples. The translation of the name, added by the evangelist, proves that the author writes for Greek readers. Ver. 39. "He saith unto them, Come and see.' They came and saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him that day : it was about the tenth hour." The disciples asked Him where His

1 6 Mjj. and 30 Mnn. reject ~,. ~ T. R. reads,;,.,,, with N A and 13 other Mjj., almost all th1: Mnn. It. V g. -

1 To the kindness ofM. Andre Cherbuliez we owe the following notices: .A!:lius. A.ristides, a Greek Sophist of the second century, a contemporary of Polycarp, whom he may have met in the streets of Sm)'Tna, relates in his Sacred Discourses (book 5), that on his arrival in the city he had a dream during the night, in which the sun, rising over the pubhc square, ordered him to hold that same day a. declamatory seance in the common hall at/our o'clock. This hour could only be. according to the manner of the ancients, ten o'clock in the morning, the hour which Xenophon calls that of the ,;r:;.{idouo-r,; a-yopa, in which the whole popula• lion frrquents the public square. So he fo1md the hull quite filled. In the, CHAP. I. 40, 41. 443 to the time when they left Jesus, not to that when they entered His abode. But in this case John would certainly have added c>'Te a7rfj),,0ov, when they went away. It is the hour at which he found, not that at which he left, that the author meant to indicate. Faith is no sooner born of testimony, than it propagates itself by the same means. Vv. 40, 41. "One of the two which heard John speak, and , followed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. He first 1 findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have fonnd the Messias (which is, being interpreted, Christ)." The author at this point of the narrative names his companion Andrew. He designates him at the same time as Simon Peter's brother. It might be thought that he does so simply with a view to the calling of Peter, which is about to be related ; but comp. vi. 8, where the same thing is repeated, and where it is impossible to allege a motive of this kind The fact is remarkable. For Simon Peter has not yet figured in the narrative. Peter is therefore treated from the first as the most important personage. Let it also be remarked, that this mode of designating Andrew supposes the Gospel history to be already known to his readers. Did Peter's visit to Jesus take place the same evening ? The affirmative follows almost necessarily, from the exact enumeration of the days in this piece. See the next day, vv. 29, 35, 43, and also ii 1. The two disciples left Jesus for some moments, and Peter, brought by Andrew, might find Him yet before night. How are we to explain the expressions "first " and " his own brother"? These words have always presented a difficulty to commentators. In reality, they contain a slight mystery, like others in which the narrative of John, at once so subtle and simple, abounds. It is ordinarily supposed that the two first book, God having commanded him to take & bath, he chose the sixth hour as the most favourable to health. Now it was winter, and it was a cold bath which was in question. The hour was therefore mid-day. What leaves no room for doubt on this head is, that he says to his friend Bassus, who keeps him wait­ ing : " Seest thou the shadow is already turning 1" The custom of the Greeks of Asia Minor at this period is therefore \>ell established by those instances. Langen has alleged a passage of the Acts of Polycarp's martyrdom (c. 7). But this passage appears to us insufficient to prove the opposite of the fact, which comes out so clearly from the words of the Greek rhetorician. I Instead of the R~ceived reading ,..,,.,,,.,;, A B MT b n, some .Mnn. Syr. read •Pt»9" .. 444 GOSPEL OF JOHN. disciples went in search of Simon each his own way, and that it was Andrew who succeeded first in finding him. But the adj. Tdv Zotov (" his own brother") would in this case be only a periphrasis for the possessive pron. his (Liicke, de W ette, Baumlein). He was first in finding, because he knew better the habits of his own brother. This explanation is far from natural. The relation of the two epithets is explained more simply, and the delicacy of the expression appears still better, if we hold that the two disciples set themselves to seek each his own brother-that is, the one Peter, the other James. Of :he two, Andrew was the first who succeeded in finding his. From this sense it follows that James had come with John, even as Peter with Andrew, to the baptism of the forerunner. James is not named, as John himself is not, and as we shall find that their mother, Salome, is not (xix. 25). This delicate touch in the narrative, which reveals the endeavour of the anonymous disciple to find his brother also, is an inimitable evidence of his identity with the author of the Gospel. The reading 'IT'pwTo<; is fully justified by this interpretation. The "IT'piiTov is either an awkward correction, or a mistake arisi1,g from the Tov which follows. The term Messiah (from neio, to anoint) was very popular; it was used even in Samaria (iv. 25). The translation Xpun6,; again supposes Greek readers. John had twice employed the Greek term Xpun6,; directly (vv. 20-25); but here he reproduces the Hebrew title, as he had done at ver. 38, and as we shall find him doing again, iv. 25, to preserve the dramatic character of his narrative. Ver. 42. "A.nd 1 he brought hi-m to Jesits. Jesus looked on him, and said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona : ~ thou shalt be called Cephas, which is, by interpretation, a stone." The pres. he .ftndeth, and he saith (ver. 41), were descriptive; the Aor. he brought, expresses the rapidity with which this act followed the finding. The look signified by eµf3"J,.,e'IT'etv, denotes that penetrating glance which reaches to the very source of the individuality. This word explains the following apostrophe. Jesus has penetrated to Simon's natural character, and dis­ covered in it the elements of the future Peter. We need not

1 ~ B L reject •111.1 before n')'r

II. Second Group.-Vv. 43-51. The following account seems to be composed, by its con­ ciseness, to baffle him who attempts to explain the events from an external point of view. Does ver. 43 express the intention only to set out for Galilee 1 Or does it indicate a real departure ? Where and how did Jesus find Philip and Nathanael? Were they also in Judea among the disciples oi John the Baptist? Or did He meet them on His arrival in Galilee? Evidently an account like this can proceed only from & man preoccupied above all with the spiritual element in the history which he relates, and who consequently merely sketches as slightly as possible the external side of events. Such is the general character of the narrative of the fourth Gospel. Vv. 43 and 44. " The day following He 1 would go forth into Galilee, and findeth Philip; and Jesus saith unto him, Follow me. Now Philip was of Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter." The natural meaning of the Aor. ~0tA:TJuev, would (willerl), is to denote a realized wish. The words: "He would go, and He findeth," are therefore equivalent to: "At the moment . hen He decided to go, He findeth ..." The simple juxtaposition of propositions is frequently found in John (Introd. p. 189). This mode of expression cannot be recon­ ciled with the idea that Jesus did not meet Philip till later, on the way to or in Galilee. Philip was in the same quarter with Andrew, John, and Peter, and no doubt for the same reason. It was important for Jesus to surround Himself chiefly with men who had undergone the preparation got from the ministry and baptism of John. The notice of ver. 44 is

l T. R, here reads • l,io-ou1 with 5 .Byz., and rejects it with four of them in ihe following proposition. 448 GOSPEL OF JOHN. introduced here to indicate that it was through the instru­ mentality of the two brothers, Andrew and Peter, that Philip was brought into contact with Jesus. On the other hand, the­ term He findeth, is incompatible with the idea that they had positively brought him. At the time of starting, Jesus pro­ bably found him conver.eing with his two friends; on which he invited him to join Him along with them. The words : "Follow me," therefore simply signify : "Accompany me on this journey." But Jesus knew well what would result from this bond once formed; and it is impossible to suppose that this invitation had not in His view a higher bearing. The verb n0hvquev, denoting a deliberate resolution, leads us to ask what was the motive which decided Jesus to start for Galilee. Hengstenberg thinks that He wished to act in accordance with the prophecies, pointing to Galilee as the theatre of the Messianic ministry. This explanation would give an artificial air to the conduct of Jesus. According to others, He wished to keep His sphere of action apart from that of the Baptist ; or, yet more, to remove from the seat of the hierarchy, which had just shown itself unfavourably dis­ posed toward His forerunner. The subsequent narrative, ii. 12-22, leads to another solution. Jesus must inaugurate His Messianic ministry at Jerusalem. But for that He must await the solemn period of the feast of Passover. Previously, therefore, He resolved to repair to His family, and so close the first part of His earthly existence, the period of his private life. Ver. 45. "Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, We have found Him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth,1 the son of Joseph." The part taken by Philip in the calling of Nathanael is like that of Andrew in the calling of Peter, and of Peter and. Andrew in that of Philip. One lighted torch serves to light another ; and thus faith is propagated. Luthardt finely points out the dull and complicated form of Philip's profession, those long considera­ tions, that Messianic certificate in full form, which contrasts with the lively and unembarrassed style of Andrew's pro­ fession (ver. 41). The same characteristics reappear vi. 1-13, and perhaps also xii 21, 22. From the fact that

1 T. R. with E F G H K M U V r A IT: Noo~ctp,P; ~ A B L X : Na~ap,.- ; A : l\"~"l"'P; e: Na~"f'" (see my Comm. on Gmpel of Luke, 2d ed. vol. i. pp. 88, 89). CHAP. I. 46. 44!}

Philip designates Jesus as the son of Joseph and a native of Nazareth, Strauss, de W ette, and others conclude that the fourth evangelist did not know or did not allow the miracu­ lous origin of Jesus and His birth at Bethlehem: as if it were the evangelist and not Philip who was speaking here; and as if, after exchanging a dozen words with Jesus, Philip cou1d ½ave been in full possession of the most intimate circum­ stances of His birth and infancy l Andrew and Peter could not have informed him, for they were ignorant of them themselves. The place of Nathanael's calling is not indicated. The most probable supposition is, that Jesus and His disciples met him on the journey. Philip, who was his fellow-citizen. -Nathanael was a Galilean, of Cana (xxi. 2),-became the link of union between Jesus and him. Nathanael was per­ haps returning home from the vicinity of John the Baptist ; or he might be going, like all his devout fellow-countrymen, to be baptized by him. He had just been resting for some moments under the shade of a fig-tree, when he met Jesus and his companions (comp. ver. 48). There is no ground for Ewald's supposition, that the meeting took place at Cana. The very circumstantial account of N athanael's calling leads to the belief that he was afterwards one of the apostles ; this is the case with all the disciples mentioned in this passage. This appears further from xxi. 2, where the apostles are distinguished from simple disciples, and where Nathanael is placed among the former. As this name does not figure in the lists of the apostles (Matt. x. 3 ; Mark iii. 18 ; Luke vi. 14; Acts i. 13), it is generally held that Nathanael is no other than Bartholomew, whose name is joined with Philip's in almost all those catalogues. Bartholomew being only a patronymic (son of Tolmai or Ptolemy), there is no difficulty in this supposition. As to Spath's hypothesis, that Nathanael is a symbolical name (the word signifies gift of God), invented by the later author to designate the Apostle John, it is one of those fancies of modern criticism which does not even need to be refuted by its incompatibility with xxi. 2. Ver. 46. « And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any oood thing come out of Nazareth 1 Philip saith unto him, Come and .;u." According to Meyer, N athanael's answer alludes to the reputation for immorality which attached to the town of GOD~T. 2 F JOHN. 450 GOSPEL OF JOHN.

Nazareth ; according to Liicke and de W ette, to the smallness of the place. But there is no historical evidence that Nazareth was a place of worse fame, or less esteemed, than any other township of Galilee. Nathanael's answer requires no such suppositions. Is it not much better to connect this answer with the saying of Philip? Nathanael, not remembering any prophecy which assigns to Nazareth so important a part, is astonished; all the more because Cana is only a league distant from Nazareth, and because it is difficult for him to imagine this little neighbouring village raised all at once to so lofty a destiny. Every one knows the petty jealousies which frequently exist between village and village. The expression, any good thing, is evidently a litotes: "anything so eminent as such a personage." Here we observe for the first time a peculiarity in the narrative of John. It seems that the author takes pleasure in recalling certain objections to the Messianic dig­ nity of Jesus, leaving them without any reply, because every reader acquainted with the Gospel history made short work of them at the moment; comp. vii. 27, 35, 42, etc. At the time when John wrote, every one knew that Jesus was not really of Nazareth. Philip's answer, "Come and see," is at once the simplest and profoundest apologetics. To every upright heart Jesus proves Himself by showing Himself. This rests -0n the truth expressed in ver. 9. Comp. iii. 21. Ver. 4 7. "Jesus saw 1 Nathanael cryming to Him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no gu1:le ! " Nathanael is one of those upright men who have only to see Jesus to believe in Him; Philip knows it well Jesus also, on seeing him, recognises and signalizes this quality in him. Searching him with His glance, as He searched Simon, He makes this reflection aloud in regard to him (wEpl, avrov) : " Behold ..." We may refer the adverb aX7J0wc;, indeed, either to to€ : "Behold really," or to 'Iapa7JAir~c;: "A man who is truly an Israelite." In the former case, the words, in whom there is no guile, would have no relation to the national Israelitish character, and would refer to Nathanael's personal character. In the second case, they would, on the contrary, define the notion of the true Israelite. This second sense is more natural, both grammatically and logically, and it corre- , M a.lone reads ,2'N• • • • a,,-.._ CHAP. I. 4S. 4,51

,;ipon<:s better to the importance of the title Israelite, and to the original meaning of the name. The name of Israel (conqueror of God), as is known, was substituted for that of Jacob (supplanter), which indicates deceit and trickery, to characterize the tpumph of righteousness in the patriarch in consequence of hil, wrestling with the Lord. The lawful struggle with God, by means of humiliation and prayer (Hos. xii. 4, 5), replaced the use of perverse means. The absence of guile is therefore the character of his true spiritual descendants. Ver. 48. "Nathanael saith unto Him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and sdid unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig-tree, I saw thee." This reply, in which Nathanael seems to appropriate to him­ self such a eulogy, has been criticised as wanting in modesty. But he wishes simply to know on what ground Jesus judges him thus. If account is taken of the extraordinary effect produced on Nathanael by the answer of Jesus (ver. 49), it must contain in his view the proof of a supernatural know­ ledge which Jesus has of him. Lucke connects this knowledge solely with the inward state of Ni'lthanael Meyer, on the contrary, applies it only to the external fact of his sitting under the fig-tree. But if we are to understand the relation of this saying of Jesus, on the one hand to His previous declaration (ver. 47), on the other to Nathanael's exclamation (ver. 49), it is indispensable to conjoin both views. Not only does Nathanael recognise that he was seen by Jesus in a place where His natural sight could not reach, but he feels that this stranger's eye has penetrated him to his inmost depths, and that it is only in virtue of this penetration that He can give him the title with which He has just accosted him. If Nathanael was preparing to receive the baptism of repentance, serious thoughts must have filled his heart. What had passed in him at that period of self-concentration ? Had he made the loyal confession of some sin to God (Ps. xxxii. 1, 2), or taken a holy resolution-made a vow, for example, to Tepair some wrong ? However that may be, on hearing the word of Jesus, he feels himself penetrated by a look which must somehow participate in the omniscience of God Himself. The words, being under the fig-tree, may refer grammatically -either to what precedes : " before that Philip called thee unde1 452 GOSPEL OF JOHN,

the fig-tree," or to what follows: "I saw thee under the fig-tree.'~ The second is the more natural sense: the situation in which Jesus saw him is more important than that in which Philip called him. The construction of {nr6, followed by the acc. (Tijv CTUK}jv), with the verb of rest, is explained by the fact that to the local relation there is joined the moral notion of taking refuge. I saw, denotes a view like that of Elisha (2 Kings v.). In Jesus, as in the prophets, there was a higher vision, which may be regarded as a partial association with the perfect vision of God. At this word Nathanael feels himself penetrated with a ray of divine light. Ver. 49. "Nathanael answered and saith unto Him,1 Rabbi~ Thou art the Son of God ; Thou art the King of Israel." By the title Son of God, he expresses the transport which seized him on the discovery of this intimate relation between Jesus and God, of which he has just had experience. Liicke, Meyer, a.nd most others, hold that this title is here the equivalent of Messiah. They think this proved by the following term : the King of Israel. But this is the very circumstance which excludes the alleged synonymy. If the two titles had the same meaning, the second would require at least to be joined to the former in the way of simple apposition, while the repetition of the pron. and verb uv El, Thoii art, before the second title, excludes this synonymy, which, besides, would ,mly amount to an awkward tautology. And further, the title Messiah does not express with liveliness and freshness the immedi~te impression experienced by Nathanael From its very nature it is the product of an act of reflection, and could only occur here second. To speak generally, we believe that this equivalency of the two terms, Son of God, and Messiah, has no existence, and that it is impossible to quote a single valid example of it. It is one of those numerous traditional fictions which should be summarily disposed of by a correct exegesis. The word Son of God expresses in the mouth of Nathanael the feelings, still very vague, it is true, but imme­ diately resulting from what has just passed, of an exceptional relation between ,Jesus and God. But vague as this impression is, it is nevertheless rich and full, like everything which is matter of feeling, more even, perhaps, than if it were already 1 B L reject ..., ;.,'.Jiu ,ou.-., ; tt reads ,.,,, .,,,.,,. CHAP. L 50, lit. 453

?educed to a dogmatic formula. As Luthardt observes: "Nathanael's faith will never possess more than it embraces at this moment," the living person of Jesus. It will only be able to possess it more distinctly. The gold-seeker puts his hand ,on an ingot ; when he has coined it, he has it better, but not more. The two titles complete one another : Son of God bears on the relation of Jesus to God; King of Israel, on His rela­ tion to the chosen people. The second title is the logical conseq_uence of the first. The personage who lives in so intimate a relation to God, can only be, as is alleged, the King of Israel, the Messiah. This second title corresponds to that ,of Israelite indeed, with which Jesus had saluted Nathanael. The faithful subject has recognised and salutes his King. .Jesus is conscious that He has just taken the first step in a new career, that of miraculous signs, of which His life till then had been completely destitute; and His answer breathes the most elevated feeling of the greatness of the occasion. Ver. 50. "Jesits answered and said unto him, Because I -1:iaid unto thee that 1 I saw thee under the .fig-tree, thou believest; thou shalt see 8 greater things than these." Since the time of

f]U, From this time forward 1 ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God aseending and deseending upon the Son of man." We meet for the first time with the formula, .Amen, amen, which is found twenty-five times in John (Meyer),and nowhere else in the N. T. Thence is derived the title of Jesus, The Amen (Rev. iii. 14). This word (from )r.l~, firmum juit) is, properly speaking, a verbal adjective, firm, worthy of faith; it is used as a substantive (Isa. lxv. 16): )r.l~ •n,~::i, "by the God of truth." It also becomes an adverb in a great number of 0. T. passages, to signify, with a declaration: that remains sure ; with a promise: let it be realized ! This adverb is. doubled, as in John, in the two following passages: Num. v. 22: "Then the woman (accused of adultery) shall answer, Amen, amen;" Neh. viii 6: ".All the pecple answered, Amen, amen." This repetition implies a doubt to be overcome in the mind of the hearer. The supposed doubt arises sometimes, as here, from the greatness of the thing promised ; sometimes from a prejudice which struggles against the truth asserted (for example, iii. 3, 5). The oinission of a1r' &pn, from this time, though supported by three old .Alex. Mjj., is condemned by almost all modems. So late as 1859, Tischendorf said: "cur omissum sit, facile dictu; c,ur additum, vi:.v di:.veris." The Sina'iticus has led him to change his opinion (8th ed.). The word is decidedly authentic; witness its very difficulty. It was referred to real appearances of angels (so Chrysostom); now such facts are not mentioned till about the end of Jesus' life.-There is a close connection between the two ideas : heaven open, and the angels ascending and descending. By the abode of Jesus here below, the communication between heaven and earth is reopened, and the relation between the inhabitants oi the two spheres recommences ; for earth and heaven are no longer two, but one whole (Eph. i 10; Col. i. 20). The second phrase proves that Jesus is thinking of Jacob's vision (Gen. xxviii. 12, 13). The ladder on which the angels ascend nnd descend represents, in Genesis, the protection of divine providence, and of its invisible agents vouchBafed to the patriarch. What is about to pass under the eyes of His

1 ~ B L, It. Cop. Or. omit ""'' &p

by Jesus as an army grouped round their chief, the Son of man, who says to one, Go, and to another, Do tkis. Those servants then ascend to seek power from God ; then the:y

antithesis, by which it gave them completeness. It declared the relation of Jesus to men, as the first exhibited His excep­ tional relation to God, and the second His historical relation to the people of Israel. Those three relations do in reality ,exhaust the life and history of Jesus.

The Son of Man. Jesus here begins to designate Himself by the name Son of man, and it is quite probable that this was really the first occasion on which He took the title. We find it thirty-nine times in the Synoptics (by connecting ·the parallels; most frequently in Matthew and Luke); ten times in John (i. 52, iii. 13, 14, v. 27 [without the uticle], vi. 27, 53, 62, viii. 28, xii. 23, 34, xiii. 31). Regarding its meaning and origin, very different opinions prevail among modern critics. These opinions may be arranged in two principal ,classes. I. Some think that Jesus is here borrowing from the Old Testa­ ment a sort of technical title fitted to designate Him either as a _prophet,-thus it would be an allusion to the name Son of man, which God uses in addressing Ezekiel,-or as the Messiah, in allu­ sion to Dan. vii. 13: "And I saw one like a son of 'fJU1/f/, coming on the clouds of heaven." This Messianic prophecy had become so popular in Israel, that the Messiah had received the name of Anani, ·•m,', the man of the clouds. It would thus be natural to suppose that Jesus chose the term as denoting in a popular way His Messianic function ; all the more that there exists a saying of Jesus :in which He has solemnly referred to this description of Daniel while appropriating it to Himself, Matt. xxvi. 64: "From this time ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." Of those two alleged allusions, the first is untenable ; for it is not as a prophet that God calls Ezekiel son of man, but as a creature wholly powerless to do the divine work of which He is inviting him to become the agent-thus so far as he is man. Would it not be contrary to all logic to main­ tain that, because God in one case has called a prophet son of man, it follows that the name is the equivalent of the title prophet 11 The allusion to Daniel as the basis of this designation proper to Jesus, is admitted by almost all modern interpreters, Liicke, Bleek, Ewald, Hilgenfeld, Renan, Strauss, Meyer, etc. This is also, as it seems, the opinion of M. W abnitz. If the question were : Did Jesus, in thus designating Himself, l associate in His mind this title, and the: like a son of man of Daniel 1 it would seem difficult to deny it, at least as to the occasion when

1 Comp. the detailed refutation of this interpretation given by M. Vernes, and to a certain extent by Weizsacker, iu the article of M. Wabnitz, Revue TMot., Oct. 1874, p. 165 et seq. 458 GOSPEL OF JOHN.

He proclaimed Himself the Messiah in answer to the high priest: before the Sanhedrim. But that is not the question. The point is whether, in choosing this name as His own by predilection, Jesus­ meant : "I am the Messiah announced by Daniel," or whether it was a much more personal and profound feeling of what He· was to humanity, which impelled Him to create the name spon­ taneously. The following are the reasons which preclude us from regarding this title as a simple reproduction of Daniel's expression : lst,. What Jesus borrows from the Old Testament has in general only the character of accommodation. The idea itself, as well as its expression, springs up originally from His heart and mind ; only to make way for it more easily to the hearts of His hearers, He readily connects it with some saying of Scripture. How can we believe - that the chosen name which Jesus used habitually as His own was merely the product of slavish imitation 1 If anything must have found expression in the depths of His own consciousness, it is this name. 2d, Throughout th-, whole course of John's Gospel, Jesus­ carefully avoids, as we shall see, proclaiming Himself the Messiah, Xpun6,., before the peorile ; because He knows the political meaning commonly attached to the term, and that the least misunderstand­ ing on this point would have been instantly fatal to His work. He uses circumlocutions of every kind to express His Messianic func­ tions, but never the term itself. Comp. viii. 24, 25, x. 24, 25, etc. . . . And in direct contradiction to this procedure, we are to suppose that He chose a designation which had the technical mean­ ing of Messiah in popular opinion ! 3d, Two passages in John prove that the name Son of man was not generally applied to thEt Messiah: xii. 34, where the people ask Jesus what personage it ia whom He designates by the name Son of man (see the exegesis); and v. 27, where Jesus says that the Father has committed all judgment to Him, because He is Son of man. Assuredly, if this expression had signified here the Messiah, the article the could not have been wanting. It was indispensable to designate the personage announced under this name. Without the article there is here a simple indi­ cation of dignity. God makes Him the judge of men because He is a member of the human race. Besides, let us not forget that in Daniel judgment is exercised, not as M. Renan wrongly says, by the, Son of man, but by Jehovah Himself; and it is only after this act is wholly finished that there appears in the clouds the Son of man to whom dominion is given. 1 4th, In the Synoptics also there are passages where the meaning Messiah does not suit the words Son of man. It is enough to quote Matt. xvi. 13, 15, where Jesus asks His disciples, " Whom say men that I the Son of man am 1 . . .

1 It is true that in the Book of Enoch (c. 37-71) the Messiah is several tim6&· ea lied the Son of man. But the passage is suspected of Christian interpolations (in Herwg's Encycl., art. "Messie," by Oehler; Keim, Gesch. Jesu, ii. p. 69). In any case, were those pieces entirely auth,mtic, the passages in John prove that t!!e denomination was uot yet curre11t among the p<;ople. THE SON OF MAN. 459

And whom say ye that I am 1" If this term had been equivalent to that of Messiah, would Holtzmann not be right in asking how Jesus, after having designated Himself a hundred times as the Son of man, could yet put this question to His disciples : " Whom do ye take me to be i" 6th, The appearance of the Son of man in Daniel's prophecy has an exclusively eschatological significance. The matter in question is the glorious establishment of the final king­ dom. Now it is not easy to understand how, from such a repre:ien­ tation, Jesus could have taken His personal name during the very period of His earthly abasement; while we ean perfectly under­ stand why this designation having been once adopted for other reasons, He made express allusion to it as it occurs in Daniel's prophecy, at the moment when, in presence of the Sanhedrim, He required to affirm His glorious return, and His dignity as the judge of His judges. Let us add, finally, that Daniel did not say, I saw a son of man, or the Son of man, but vaguely: like (the figure of) a son of man. Could Jesus from such an expression borrow the stereotyped name Son of man 'I 6th, If we are to believe the common exegesis, the term Son of God had the meaning of Messiah. If the term Son of man likewise signified Messiah, it would follow that Son of God signified Son of man, or inversely. 1 Now those two terms evidently express an antithesis and not an identity. They may and ought undoubtedly to be referred both to the person of the Messiah, but to designate it in two different aspects logically distinct and supplementary of each other. II. These reflections lead us to the second class of interpreta­ tions, that which takes this title to be an expression emanating from the inner self-consciousness of Jesus, whether the feeling of His greatness or that of His abasement be regarded as ruling Him· in this choice. 1. There is no need to refute the explanation of Paulus and Fritzsche: "The individual whom you see before you," h(Yl'flo ille quem bene nostis. Would Jesus have thus paraphrased more than fifty times the pronoun I? 2. De W ette and Tholuck see in this name which Jesus takes, the notion of the weakness of His earthly appearance. But who can believe that God gives over to Jesus all judgment because of the infirmity of His earthly appearance i v. 27. 3. Chrysostom, Grotius, and some moderns find in this name of Jesus a deliberate antithesis to His essential divine Sonship. Who else than a being strange to the human family could take for his characteristic name, the title, child of the race 1 This explana­ tion is ingenious, but it does not correspond well to the simplicity of the feeling of Jesus. Others incline to the side of the feeling of His glory, thus : . 4. Keerl thinks that this title is applied to the Son of God,_ m so far as His essence is to be in God the eternal man. The Messiah

1 To this identification, indeed, all the endeavours tend which Keim makes to attenuate the difference between thOlle two terms, ii. p. 388. 4ti0 GOSPEL OF JOHN, differs from that eternal man only because He is clothed with terrestrial flesh and blood. But would not the term Son of man be wholly inappropriate to express such an idea 1 It would have required the first-born or archetype of humanity. Gess 1 thinks that this expression designates Jesus as "the mani­ festation of divine majesty in the form of human life." He supports his view by the passages in which there are ascribed to the Son of man the divine functions of the pardon of sin (Matt. ix. 6), of judgment (Matt. xvi. 27, xxv. 31), of sovereignty over angels (Matt. xiii. 4J ), etc.,-functions which far surpass the capacities of human nature even when perfected. But what if perfected human nature in its very idea is nothing else than the participation of the creature in the divine perfections whose organ it is destined to become 1 In this case there is nothing in the functions enumerated which passes beyond the limits of true human nature. Besides, it seems to us impossible that the natural meaning of the expression Son of man should be to designate the divine majesty, even sup­ posing it united to the human form. We might ask M. Gess how this explanation accords with his theory of the kenosis, according to which Jesus must have lived here below destitute of His divine glory. Only one explanation appears to us to answer to all historical and exegetical demands, that which under various forms is found radically the same in Bohme, Neander, Ebrard, Olshausen, Bey­ schlag, Holtzmann, Wittichen, and Hofmann, and which we defended in the first edition of this work. . We have seen that in v. 27 the term Son of man denotes, in the mouth of Jesus Himself, His participation in human nature. And is not this what is naturally signified by the term Son of man,, which does not denote either a son of Adwm, or the son of His Father, but a true son of humanity, & representative of the race itse1£ Such is the meaning of the phrase in Ps. viii. 4 : " What is man, that Thou art mindful of him 1 and the son of man, that Thou visitest him 1 " Such is its meaning in the divine address to Ezekiel. It is the same (Dan. vii. 13) where the human figure is the emblem of the divine kingdom, just as the wild beasts were the types of earthly power in its various pre-Messianic phases. This emblem of a son of man admirably expresses the profoundly human character of the kingdom of God. All those phrases arise from the same feeling which suggested to Jesus the designation of which we are speaking. Jesus wished above all, in adopting it, to emphasize His entire homogeneousness with us. He did not borrow a name ready-made, but He obeyed the instinct of His love for humanity, and the feeling of that indissoluble union with the race into which He had entered. It was the mar1rnd expression of the fact which John has declared when he says : " The Word was made flesh," But let us not forget that Jesus did not say: "a son of man," but "the Son of man." Thereby He proclaimed Himself not only a

1 Christi Zeugniss von seiner Person und seinem Werk, 1870. THE SON OF MAN. 461

man, a true man, but the true man, the normal representative of the human type. In the very act of affirming His equality with us He thus declared His absolute superiority over all the other membe~s of the human race. To designate Himself thus was certainly to affirm His dignity as Messiah, but only in an implicit way. By means of it He succeeded in expressing the idea while avoiding the ordinary term, the meaning of which was falsified. Without calling Himself the Christ, Re yet said to every man : " Behold me, and thou shalt see what thou shouldst have been, and what through me thou mayest yet become." This substitution of the true idea of the Messia,h for the word Messiah corresponded in two important respects to the inner feeling of Jesus : First, He succeeded thereby in removing from His ministry everything like a political bearing, and in inaugurating the purest Messianic spirituality. In the second place, He freed the notion of the kingdom of God from everything like theocratic particularism. Jesus thus announced Himself as the Representative and Head not merely of Israel, but of the whole of humanity. This is what has led Bohme to say ( Versuck das Gekeimniss des Menschensohns zuentkullen, 1839) that the object of Jesus in choosing this name was to dejudaize the idea of the Messiah. We can see with what admirable prudence Jesus acted in the choice of this name, which was undoubtedly the fruit of His inner life. His love in this, as in everything, guided Him wondrously. Perhaps His spiritual tact was directed in its choice by the most ancient of all prophecies, that which was the germ whence grew the true Messianic revelations, and which has as its salient features, on the one hand the purest spirituality, on the other the widest univer­ ~ality : " The seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent." In the phrase, Son of man, the word rnan, av0pw7ro,;, denotes not the individual, but the species, and refers equally to the two sexes; now the woman's part is to represent himwn nature as such. There is therefore no great interval between the term Son of man, and this: the seed of the woman. Jesus would thus describe.Himself as the normal man, called consequently to accom­ plish the grand task of humanity, that of conquering the enemy of God and men.1 Is it the feeling of greatness which predominates over that of weakness, or the reverse i To this question, put by Keim, I answer, with Pascal : "If you abase man, I exalt h1m ; if you exalt him, I abase him." Does not Ps. viii. say that man's greatness consists in ~is very meanness in which God condescends to visit him; as his

1 In the idea which we have above expounded, there converge, a~ it seems to ns, all the explanations which belong to this class, and which we shall hastily enumerate. Baur: "A simple man, to whom belong all the miseries which can be affirmed of any man whatever." Schenkel: "The representative of the 'Poor." Holtzmann: "He to whom may be applied, in the highest degree, whatever may be said of any other man;" or, '' the indispensable organic cenfre. of the kingdom of God in humanity." Wittich en : "The perfrct realization of 462 GOSPEL OF JOHN, abasement, in the glorious grace of this visitation f Those two aspects of human life, sublime in its lowliness, infinitely poor in ite wealth, found in Jesus their complete realization, in His conscious­ ness their perfeetly distinct reflection ; and He conjoined them indissolubly in His title Son of man. the idea of man, with the mission to realize it in humanity." M. Colani : "The man who is the Messiah, but who will not designate Himself expressly ll.'l such." Hofmann: "The man in whom all the history of humanity must fuid its issue.'' N eander : "He who realizes the idea of humanity." Bohme : " The universal Messiah." "'e are surprised to find this explanation rejected off-hand by M. Wabuitz in the following words: "It will be desirable also to discard from tht immediate histoncal sense of our title . ... etc.' (p. 170, note).

END OF VOL. I